The speaker started too, and gave a cry of surprise that was almost rapture. A girl, hatless, with dark hair heaped carelessly on the top of her small head, a girl with the loveliest Italian eyes Eve had ever seen, leaned forward over the gunwale, stretching out both her gloveless hands to Vansittart.
“It is you,” she cried in Italian; “I thought I should never see you again;” and then, with a quick glance at Eve, and in almost a whisper, “Is that your wife?”
“Si, Si’ora.”
The girl looked at Eve with bold unfriendly eyes, and from her looked back again to Vansittart, as his boat passed into the lock. Her manner had been so absorbing, her beauty was so startling, that it was only in this last moment that Eve recognized the man rowing as Sefton, and saw that the other two passengers were a stout middle-aged woman and a little boy, both of them dark eyed and foreign looking, like the girl.
When Eve and Vansittart looked at each other in the gloom of the lock both were deadly pale.
“Who is that girl?” she asked huskily.
“An Italian singer—Signora Vivanti. You must have heard of her; she is the rage at the Apollo.”
“But she knows you—intimately. She was enraptured at seeing you. Her whole face lighted up.”
“That is the southern manner; an organ-grinder will do as much for you if you fling him a penny.”
“How did you come to know her?”