The short woman who clung weeping to his arm, her face concealed by an enormous black-bordered handkerchief, was undoubtedly his housekeeper, old Giulia.
And the third? Austin caught his breath quickly as he looked at her, just managing to check the involuntary exclamation that rose to his lips.
She was one of the most beautiful creatures he had ever seen, quite young, probably not more than seventeen, Italian certainly; no other country could produce that vivid, passionate type, that exquisite contour of cheek and throat, that delicate olive skin, birthright of daughters of the sun, those wonderful, tawny eyes shadowed by the long, black lashes.
She was dressed in deep mourning, with a voluminous black veil flung back from her face and falling nearly to the hem of her skirt, but that sombre garb was the only sign of grief about her; it seemed to enhance rather than dim her radiant youth.
There was something triumphant, almost insolent, about her, on such a scene. She stood erect, her graceful head thrown back a little, her full, curved lips slightly parted, her eyes, like those of Cacciola, fixed on Boris Melikoff with an ardent, passionate, self-revealing gaze. She seemed utterly oblivious of every one and everything else, and as he watched her Austin Starr was momentarily oblivious of every one but her.
He was only vaguely aware that the priest’s sonorous voice ceased; but a moment later he was startled by a swift change in the girl’s face. It darkened, as a summer sky sometimes darkens at the advent of a thunder-cloud; her black eyebrows contracted, so did her red lips, the love-light vanished from her eyes; he could have sworn that they flashed red. For a moment the face was transformed to that of a fiend incarnate, obsessed by anger, hatred, jealousy.
Instinctively he looked around to see what had caused this extraordinary emotion, and saw that something had happened by the grave. The Russian group had closed up around Melikoff, towards whom the priests and Mr. Twining had turned as if in shocked remonstrance, while the men who were in the very act of lowering the coffin had paused, and the great purple heart of flowers lay, face downwards, right on the margin of the moss-lined grave.
“What’s up?” he asked the man next him—he whom he had silenced a few minutes before.
“Didn’t you see? The old man laid the heart on the coffin just at the last moment, and that tall, dark, foreign chap stepped forward, chucked it aside, and put those red lilies he had on it. The others pulled him back, and—look—he’s crying or fainting or something. Queer, eh?”
Even as he spoke Thomson, who alone seemed to have retained his composure, lifted the heart and replaced it, but below the lilies, and signed to the men to proceed with their task.