Elsie, her face covered with bandages, acknowledged my thanks by wiggling her foot.
Mrs. Farnsworth said she would put Elsie to bed. Now, I thought, Alice would make some sign if she knew anything that would explain Montani and the prisoner in the tool-house. But the whole affair only moved her to laughter and she seemed less a grown woman than ever in her white robe. My efforts to impress her with the seriousness of the attempt to secure the fan only added to her delight.
"How droll! How very droll! You couldn't possibly have arranged anything that would please me more! It's delicious! As you say in America, it's perfectly killing!"
I suggested that the holding of a prisoner without process of law might present embarrassments.
"I know," she cried, clapping her hands joyfully. "You mean we are likely to bump into dear old habeas corpus! The sheriff will come and read a solemn paper to you and you will have to hie you to court and produce the body of the prisoner. That will be splendid!"
"It won't be so funny if——"
I was about to say that the humor of the thing would be spoiled somewhat if she were made a witness and there proved to be something irregular about the fan which had caused all the trouble, but I hadn't the heart to do it. To spoil such merriment as bubbled in her heart would be cruel—an atrocity as base as snatching a plaything from a joyous child.
"Constance and I so love the unusual—and it is so hard to find!" she continued. "And yet from the moment I reached the gates of these premises things have happened! Nothing is omitted! Strange visitors; fierce attacks upon our guards, and still the mystery deepens in the wee sma' hours, with heroes and heroines at every turn! To think that that absurd little Dutch was asleep in the garden and really captured the spy or whatever he is! But you are a hero too! You shall be decorated!"
She walked to a stand and pondered a moment before a vase of roses, chose a long-stemmed red one and struck me lightly across the shoulder with it.
"Arise, sir knight! You should have knelt, but to kneel in skirts requires practice; you could hardly have managed in that monk's robe."