It was plain that the luckless waif understood clearly enough now what was required of her, and it was also plain that she recognized that the moment for supplication had gone by. She stepped back a pace or two upon the smooth turf, and slipping off her unlaced shoes,—shoes far too large for her small feet,—she passed the back of her hand quickly across her eyes, shook her hair away from her forehead, and began a slow, pathetic little dance.
“Higher!” cried Old Flick in an excited voice, beating the air with his hand and humming a strange snatch of a tune that might have inspired the dances of Polynesian cannibals. “Higher, I tell ’ee!”
The girl felt compelled to obey; and putting one hand on her hip and lifting up her skirt with the other, she proceeded, shyly and in forlorn silence, to dance an old Neapolitan folk-dance, such as might be witnessed, on any summer evening, by the shores of Amalfi or Sorrento.
It was at this moment that Mr. Quincunx made his appearance against the sky-line above them. He looked for one brief second at the girl’s bare arms, waving curls, and light-swinging body, and then leapt down between them.
All nervousness, all timidity, seemed to have fallen away from him like a snake’s winter-skin under the spring sun. He seized the child’s hand with an air of indescribable gentleness and authority, and made so menacing and threatening a gesture that Old Flick, staggering backwards, nearly fell to the ground.
“Whose child is this?” he demanded sternly, soothing the frightened little dancer with one hand, while with the other he shook his cane in the direction of the gasping and protesting old man.
“Whose child is this? You’ve stolen her, you old rascal! You’re no Italian,—anyone can see that! You’re a damned old tramp, and if you weren’t so old and ugly I’d beat you to death; do you hear?—to death, you villain! Whose child is she? Can’t you speak? Take care; I’m badly tempted to make you taste this,—to make you skip and dance a little!
“What do you say? Job Love’s circus? Well,—he’s not an Italian either, is he? So if you haven’t stolen her, he has.”
He turned to the child, stooping over her with infinite tenderness, and folding the shawl of which she had again possessed herself, with hands as gentle as a mother’s, about her shoulders and head.
“Where are your parents, my darling?” he asked, adding with a flash of amazing presence of mind,—“your ‘padre’ and ‘madre’?”