"Maria Angelina Santonini," she told him soberly. "Yes, that is I."
"Why of course I remember," he insisted. "A little girl in a white dress. A big hat which you took off. Your first night in America. We had a wonderful dance together——"
"And you said you would come to the mountains," she told him childishly.
He stared a moment. "Why, so I did. . . . And here I am. And here you are. To think I did not know you—I've been wondering whom you made me want to think of! But I took you for a youngster, you know, a regular ten-year-old runaway. Why, with your hair down like that—— Of course, it was absurd of me."
He paused with a smile for the absurdity of it.
Gallantly she tried to give him back that smile but there was something so wan and piteous in the curve of her soft lips, something so hurt and sick in the shadows of her dark eyes, that Barry Elder felt oddly silenced.
And then he tried to cover that silence with kind chatter as he moved about his room once more in hospitable preparation.
"It was Sandy, here, who really found you," he told her. "He whined at the door till I let him out and then he came back, barking, for me, so I had to go. I was really looking for a mink. Sandy's always excited about minks."
Maria Angelina put a hand to the dog's head and stroked it.
"I was so tired," she said. "I think I was asleep."