She looks up at him from her lowly posture, a charming, half-apologetic, wholly peace-making smile fleeting across her small face, while she still chafes her hand—that little pinched hand which makes him feel so ridiculously tender.
"Are you, too, sorry that you came?" she asks.
The question takes him by surprise. He is not prepared for so friendly and almost intimate a sequel to her short, shy answers, and her abrupt quitting of him. He hesitates how to answer it; and as he hesitates, she rises and stands beside him. It is not easy for a grown person to rise gracefully from a seat on the floor. Jim catches himself thinking with what a roll and a flounder Cecilia would have executed the same manœuvre; but Elizabeth, supple and light, rises as smoothly as an exhalation from a summer meadow.
"If I was rude to you just now," she says, rather tremulously; "if I am ever rude to you in the future, I hope you will understand—I hope you will put it down to the fact that I—I—am very ignorant of—that I know very little of the world."
The two men are gone; so is the child; so is the dog; and Elizabeth is shutting up the piano and removing the score.
"What a noise we made!" she says, smiling at the recollection.
"If you make such a shocking noise again, the signora and the other lodgers will infallibly interfere."
Mrs. Le Marchant has followed her daughter, and now throws one arm about her slight neck, with a gesture of passionate affection.
"If you knew," she says, in a voice of deep and happy agitation, "what it was to me to hear you laugh as you did to-day!"