A shriek burst from the children, and simultaneously an energetic, purposeful, round pink pig with an uplifted curl of a tail burst into the room. He was looking for the children who had deserted him. He clearly knew his way about, for he at once dashed behind the piano where the youngest had hidden away from him, and gave forth squeals of joyful discovery. The Señora ordered the children to take the beast out. He went in the utmost rebellion.
Julie did not say anything about Delphine. She was distressfully at sea concerning him. Isabel had offered to keep him, but for some not clearly defined reason, Julie did not wish to leave him with her. She left the Señora with his problem still unsolved.
Returning, she found Isabel in a disguise of costume so splendid it thrilled one like a poem. She had a tower of jewels on her head. Her body was incased in a kind of closely clinging filagree of shining armor studded with great gems—which, however, left considerable of the concrete, natural Isabel exposed. Her blue eyes sparkled like the great head jewels of a goddess. She looked as if she had been looted from some temple. Nobody, Julie decided, would be able to entertain a pretension alongside her. Her own Pleiad mistiness seemed to dissolve before this glory.
Yet Isabel came over to her and, flicking Julie’s neck with the end of her nail, exclaimed: “That white, white skin—fit for the mantle of an archangel to come down to earth in! And that white fire back of you! Have you an appointment with the millennium of the soul of man that you can contrive to look like that? Take me along, Julie—take me along!”
Isabel was obliged to leave early, but she had provided an escort for Julie; no less a person than Governor Shell of the Mohammedan Group. Julie had heard a lot about this strange, dark hermit of a man, and wondered how he came to be attending such a function; but Isabel explained that he was visiting the Governor-General, and couldn’t very well help himself.
“I don’t believe he wanted to take me,” Julie demurred. “He is said to dislike women.”
“Perhaps he didn’t,” Isabel declared, unabashed; “but when I told him about your exile on an island not far from his own, his missionary instinct was touched. You couldn’t go with any one more distinguished.”
When Governor Shell entered the room, Julie felt at once the force of his somber, reticent personality. She observed that he did not look very young, and that he had a strained sweated look as if he were pushing himself always just beyond the margin of what a man might reasonably do. It was a dark world in which he worked, in the hope of stumbling on the formula that would transform the preternaturally vicious psychologies of the Moros.
In their common experience of the far Southern Islands they found a great deal to talk about. When they reached the Governor General’s mansion, the balconies were glittering with lights festooned like fireflies against the darkness. The Palace sat in huge grounds, one side of which touched the street Malacañang, while the other dropped down to the Pasig, along which the gala boats were to appear.
Everybody was crowded onto the galleries in whimsies of costumes. Seats had been reserved for Governor Shell, and he and Julie sat down near the judges of the carnival. Almost all of these people were prominent personages, unknown to Julie; so the Governor explained them to her.