“Death letters?” queried Antony perplexed, the while his heart was singing a little pæan of joy at the vagaries of Fate’s methods.
“Yes; a will or testament. But a death letter is so infinitely more explanatory. Don’t you think, so?”
Antony laughed.
“Of course,” he agreed, light breaking in upon him.
“Take the book if you care to,” she said. “I know it nearly by heart. But I had it by me, and brought it on deck to look at it again. I didn’t want to get absorbed in anything entirely new. It takes one’s mind from all this, and seems a loss.” A little gesture indicated sunshine, sea, and sky.
“Yes,” agreed Antony, “it’s waste of time to read in the open.” And then he stopped. “Oh, I didn’t mean—” he stammered, glancing down at the book, and perceiving ungraciousness in his words.
“Oh, yes, you did,” she assured him smiling, “and it was quite true, and not in the least rude. Read it in your berth some time; you can do it there with an easy conscience.”
She gave him a little nod, which might have been considered dismissal or a hint of emphasis. Antony, being of course aware that she could not possibly find it the same pleasure to talk to him as he found it to talk to her, took it as dismissal. With a word of thanks he moved off down the deck, the blue book in his hands.
He found a retired spot forward on the boat. A curious shyness prevented him from returning to his own deck-chair, and reading the book within sight of her. In spite of his little remark against reading in the open, he was longing to make himself acquainted with the contents immediately. Had it not been her recommendation? Death letters! He laughed softly and joyously. He had never even given the things a thought before, and here, twice within ten days, they had been brought to his notice in a fashion that, to his mind, fell little short of the miraculous. And it is not at all certain that he did not consider their second queer little entry on the scene the more miraculous of the two.
He opened the book, and there, facing him from the fly-leaf, was the answer to the question he had erstwhile sought to fathom,—Pia di Donatello. His lips formed the syllables, dwelling with pleasure on the first three little letters—Pia. Oh, it was right, it was utterly and entirely right. Every other possibility vanished before it into the remotest background, unthinkable in the face of what was. Pia di Donatello! Again he repeated the musical syllables. And yet—and yet—he’d have sworn she was English. There wasn’t the faintest trace of a foreign accent in her speech. If anything, there was a hint of Irish,—the soft intonation of the Emerald Isle. Her colouring, too, was Irish, the blue-black hair, the dark violet eyes—he had discovered that they were violet; looking, for all the world, as if they had been put in with a smutty finger, as the saying goes. He revolved the problem in his mind, and a moment later came upon the solution, so he told himself. An Irish mother, and an Italian father, so he decreed, metaphorically patting himself on the back the while for his perspicacity.