“Have I displeased you all the time?” with a little tragic accent of remonstrance. “I am so sorry,” she said.
“Sorry! and displeased! it is not words like those that will do any good,” Lionel cried.
Liddy looked at him again piteously, but perhaps in the puckers round her eyes, and the droop of her mouth, there was a dimple or two which the faintest touch could have turned into smiles. She shook her head.
“You are hard upon me, Cousin Lionel; you are angry about this morning, and then you tell me it is not this morning; but all the time; and when I say I am sorry (what else can I say? for I am very sorry, and so mistaken! I thought we were such friends!) you say, words like these will not do any good. What am I to say? It is a discovery I never expected to make, that I had been—disagreeable all the time.”
“I think you want to drive me out of my senses!” he cried.
Which, indeed, was very foolish; she had all the reason and force of the argument on her side, and he, having at some point in the altercation taken a wrong turning, got only further and further astray at every step he made.
Lydia by this time had recovered all her usual composure. When one party to a controversy gets hot and weak, the other becomes calm. She felt herself to have the best of it, and it was a pleasure to her, after her recent discomfiture, to have the upper hand, and find herself in the exciting position, not altogether un-enjoyable, of skilfully fencing and keeping off an agitated man’s self-disclosure. It agitated herself a little, but the circumstances strengthened her. Besides, whatever was going to be said, this was not the moment to say it, in the streets, with the Leone almost within sight. His self-betrayal gave her force to stand against him.
“Here we are,” she said, softly, “almost at home—if you can call the hotel home. Whatever I have done amiss, I hope you will pardon me. We shall be such a short time together now. Oh——!” for some one, darting forward, caught her with the very tears in her eye, the quaver in the tone. “Mr.—Paul; Signor——”
“Not me,” said Paolo, shaking his head; “I am born in Livorno, but except that I am an Englishman; Mees Joscelyn will not find it is necessary to say Signor to me. I have had a commission—from the bureau. I am in this direction, and I wait to pay my—homage—to lay once more my respects—from the heart, from the heart!” said little Paolo, laying his hand upon that organ, “at these ladies’ feet, and to ask if I can be of service. The Signor Consul has authorized me. I am known, well known, on the board of the vapore. I could arrange the baggage, select the cabins, what Mees Joscelyn will.”
Lionel repeated instinctively his movement of last night; he came a step nearer, as if to keep the anxious Italian off.