The expression on the face of Mr. Romer’s daughter, when she recognized the American, was a palimpsest of conflicting emotions. Her surprise was still more intense when Mr. Quincunx stepped out from the shadow of the drooping tree and raised his hat to her. Her eyes for the moment looked positively scared; and her mouth opened, like the mouth of a bewildered infant. The tone with which the citizen of Ohio addressed the confused young lady made the heart of Mr. Quincunx leap for joy.
“I am astonished at you,” he said. “I should not have believed such a thing possible! Your only excuse is that this infernal jest of yours has turned out so well for the people concerned, and so shamefully for yourself. How could you treat that brave foreign child so brutally? Why—I saw her trembling and trembling, and trying to get away; and you were holding—actually holding her—while that poor mad thing came nearer! It’s a good thing for you that the Catholic spirit in her burst out at last. Do you know what spell she used to bring that girl to her senses? A spell that you will never understand, my friend, for all this baptism and confirmation business! Why—she quoted passages out of the Litany of Our Lady! I heard her clearly, and I recognized the words. I am a damned atheist myself, but if ever I felt religion to be justified it was when your cousin stopped that girl’s crying. It was like real magic. You ought to be thoroughly proud of her! I shall tell her when I see her what I feel about her.”
Gladys rose from her seat on the weir and faced them haughtily. Her surprise once over, and the rebuke having fallen, she became mistress of herself again.
“I suppose,” she said, completely ignoring Mr. Quincunx, “we’d better follow those two, and see if Lacrima gets her safely into the house. I fancy she’ll have no difficulty about it. Of course if she had not done this I should have had to do it myself. But not knowing Italian”—she added this with a sneer—“I am not so suitable a mad-house nurse.”
“It was her good heart, Gladys,” responded the American; “not her Italian, nor her Litany, that soothed that girl’s mind. I wish your heart, my friend, were half as good.”
“Well,” returned the fair girl quite cheerfully, “we’ll leave my heart for the present, and see how Lacrima has got on.”
She took the arm which Dangelis had not offered, but which his chivalry forbade him to refuse, and together they proceeded to follow the heroic Genoese.
Mr. Quincunx shuffled unregarded behind them.
They had hardly reached the keeper’s cottage, a desolate and ancient erection, of the usual stone material, darkened with damp and overshadowed by a moss-grown oak, when Lacrima herself came towards them.
She started with surprise at seeing, in the shadowy obscurity, the figures of the two men.