"There are so many things I want to know," the girl said; "but I have no right to ask," she added, looking up at him doubtfully.
"You have every right," the monk answered. "You have certainly earned it. Without the help you gave us we could not have moved. You have been more than generous——"
Miss Carson interrupted him with an impatient lifting of her head. "That sort of generosity is nothing," she said. "With you men it is different. You are all risking something. You are actually helping, while I must sit still and wait. I hope, Father," she said, smiling, "it is not wrong for me to wish I were a man."
"Wrong!" exclaimed Kalonay, in a tone of mock dismay; "of course it's wrong. It's wicked."
The monk turned and looked coldly over his shoulder at Kalonay, and the Prince laughed.
"I beg your pardon," he said, "but we are told to be contented with our lot," he argued, impenitently. "`He only is a slave who complains,' and that is true even if a heretic did say it."
The monk shook his head and turned again to Miss Carson with a tolerant smile.
"He is very young," he said, as though Kalonay did not hear him, "and wild and foolish—and yet," he added, doubtfully, "I find I love the boy." He regarded the young man with a kind but impersonal scrutiny, as though he were a picture or a statue. "Sometimes I imagine he is all I might have been," he said, "had not God given me the strength to overcome myself. He has never denied himself in anything; he is as wilful and capricious as a girl. He makes a noble friend, Miss Carson, and a generous enemy; but he is spoiled irretrievably by good fortune and good living and good health." The priest looked at the young man with a certain sad severity. "`Unstable as water, thou shalt not excel,'" he said.
The girl, in great embarrassment, turned her head away, glancing from the ocean to the sky; but Kalonay seated himself coolly on the broad balustrade of the terrace with his hands on his hips, and his heels resting on the marble tiling, and clicked the soles of his boots together.
"Oh, I have had my bad days, too, Father," he said. He turned his head on one side, and pressed his lips together, looking down.