Nathalie started, for as the girl spoke she deliberately threw off a soft white shawl that had been thrown about her shoulders. With a sudden feeling of deep pity Nathalie recognized that the princess was a hump-back!
“Oh, you won’t hate me now, will you?” pleaded Nita suddenly, as she saw Nathalie’s start of surprise, “just because I’m humped like a camel.” She caught the girl’s hand in hers and clung to it with piteous appeal in her blue eyes.
“Oh, no,” returned shocked Nathalie. “Why, I think you are lovely, even if you are—” But the word was left unsaid, as Nathalie, with sudden impulse, stooped forward and kissed the red lips.
Before she could raise herself, frightened at her own boldness, two arms were flung around her neck and Nathalie was squeezed so hard that she thought she would smother. “Oh, I just love you!” said Nita’s stifled voice from her shoulder, “and I’m going to keep you with me all the time. Oh, Mother,” she wailed beseechingly, lifting her head, but still keeping Nathalie a prisoner, “won’t you buy her?”
“Buy her!” repeated her mother, who during this affectionate outburst had stood silently by, a pleased smile struggling with an expression of dismay at the girl’s rudeness. “Why, Nita, she is not a horse to be bought and sold.”
“Well, I wish she was then,” said the child, for she was but that, dropping her arms from Nathalie’s neck and lying back with sudden exhaustion.
“Oh, she is going to faint,” cried dismayed Nathalie, while the mother rushed to the dresser for the smelling salts. But when she attempted to hold the bottle to Nita’s nose, she pushed her mother’s hand away crying, “Take that horrid thing away, and get out of the room; I want Nathalie to myself!”
And the Mystic, the woman always shrouded in gray, who looked at her neighbors with a cold, formal stare of aversion, meekly obeyed. She went softly out of the room and closed the door after her in obedience to her daughter’s sharp cry, “Do you hear? Shut the door!”
Something within Nathalie burst its bounds, she could not sit there another minute and hear the girl talk like that to her mother. “Oh, don’t speak to your mother like that, she is so good to you!” the girl’s voice trembled.
“How do you know she is good?” retorted Nita, after a short pause of surprise at this merited rebuke.