She was grateful when Cousin Jane declared for an early return. She could hardly wait to be alone.
"What did I tell you?" Jane Blair stopped suddenly in their progress to the door and turned to her husband in low-toned triumph. "She's with him. Leila's with him."
"Huh?" said Cousin Jim unexcitedly.
"She's pretended some errand in town—she's come in to get hold of him again," went on Cousin Jane hurriedly, as one who tells the story of the act to the unobservant. "She's afraid to leave him alone. . . . And he never mentioned her. I wonder——"
Maria Angelina's eyes had followed theirs. She saw a group about a table, she saw Barry Elder's white-clad shoulders and curly brown head. She saw, unregardfully, a man and woman with him, but all her eagerness, all her straining vision was on the young girl with him—a girl so blonde, so beautiful that a pang went to Maria Angelina's heart. She learned pain in a single throb.
She heard Cousin Jim quoting oddly in undertone, "'And Beauty drew him, by a single hair,'" and the words entered her consciousness hauntingly.
If Leila Grey looked like that—why then——
Yet he had said that he would come!
Maria Angelina's first night in America, like that last night in Italy, was of sleepless watching through the dark. But now there were no child's tears at leaving home. There was no anxious planning for poor Julietta. Already Julietta and Lucia and the Palazzo, even Papa and dear, dear Mamma, appeared strangely unreal—like a vanished spell—and only this night was real and this strange expectant stir in her.
And then she fell asleep and dreamed that Barry Elder was advancing to her across the long drawing-room of the Palazzo Santonini and as she turned to receive him Lucia stepped between, saying, "He is for me, instead of Paolo Tosti," and behold! Lucia's eyes were as blue as the sea and Lucia's hair was as golden as amber and her face was the face of the girl in the restaurant.