“My dear young lady,” I said, “you don’t want to be ruined for picturesqueness’ sake?”
“I shall not be ruined. I shall come back before long to stay with them. The Countess insists upon that.”
“Come back! You are going home, then?”
She sat for a moment with her eyes lowered, then with an heroic suppression of a faint tremor of the voice,—“I have no money for travelling!” she answered.
“You gave it all up?”
“I have kept enough to take me home.”
I gave an angry groan; and at this juncture Miss Spencer’s cousin, the fortunate possessor of her sacred savings and of the hand of the Provençal countess, emerged from the little dining-room. He stood on the threshold for an instant, removing the stone from a plump apricot which he had brought away from the table; then he put the apricot into his mouth, and while he let it sojourn there, gratefully, stood looking at us, with his long legs apart and his hands dropped into the pockets of his velvet jacket. My companion got up, giving him a thin glance which I caught in its passage, and which expressed a strange commixture of resignation and fascination,—a sort of perverted exaltation. Ugly, vulgar, pretentious, dishonest, as I thought the creature, he had appealed successfully to her eager and tender imagination. I was deeply disgusted, but I had no warrant to interfere, and at any rate I felt that it would be vain.
The young man waved his hand with a pictorial gesture. “Nice old court,” he observed. “Nice mellow old place. Good tone in that brick. Nice crooked old staircase.”
Decidedly, I could n’t stand it; without responding I gave my hand to Caroline Spencer. She looked at me an instant with her little white face and expanded eyes, and as she showed her pretty teeth I suppose she meant to smile.
“Don’t be sorry for me,” she said, “I am very sure I shall see something of this dear old Europe yet.”