Then the countess caught sight of her husband. “Oh, my dear, my dear!” And the rest was in Italian. In the tenderest of tones the count was addressing his wife.
Lucia came rushing down the stairs to throw herself upon Betty and cry. “Oh, I can’t help it, Betty!” she cried between little sobs. “It is all right at last! She was glad to see him and he just gathered her up in his arms! I think she is crying, too!”
It took Lucia only a few minutes to gain her self-possession and explain further. “My father says he has come to ‘get us,’ as you said, Betty, but he will stay a while if it is all right with Uncle to let me finish my school. He told me that right away. But the main thing was to find out whether Mother would receive him or not. Of course, we could not mention that before the butler. He knew my father. Wasn’t that nice?”
Betty was merely a happy spectator, but Lucia would not let her go, and when at last, after she had been called to her mother’s room for a small family reunion and had come back to Betty a thoroughly happy girl again, she ran to meet her uncle, who came in just then. “Oh Uncle!” she cried, “my father, the Count Coletti, is here!” How proudly Lucia spoke, and there was a little of question in her voice.
“Thank heaven!” replied her uncle, of whose reception of her father she had been so doubtful. “It is high time! I hope he can manage her. It’s beyond me.” But Betty knew that Mr. Murchison was laughing as he spoke. “Tell him that we’ll kill the fatted calf. Have you told the housekeeper?”
“I never thought of it, but the butler knows and he does everything or sees to it, you know.”
And at dinner, when Betty had met the count and he had told her that he already knew her as his daughter’s best friend, one little speech of the countess amused her very much.
“Think, Buddy,” she said using the old term of her childhood for her brother, “think, Buddy, what a social asset he’ll be while we stay!” And with perfect understanding now, Count Coletti looked at his wife and smiled with the rest.
In the course of the conversation, which consisted chiefly in drawing out details of Count Coletti’s African experiences, it was hinted that Lucia might return after a summer in Switzerland to finish her course in the American high school. Betty modestly expressed herself as hoping that she would, and the countess said, “We shall see.”
Truly life was full of thrills to Betty Lee. There was still school to be completed. Chet would get his diploma; and should she have some little remembrance for Chet in honor of his graduation, or not? She would ask her mother. One more year and she would have a diploma, too! But first she had to be Betty Lee, senior.