"Because we happen to have minds of our own, Michael."
"And you immediately employed them by concocting a plot to kidnap some kings!" I said. "Oh, Thusis, you are the limit!"
"I know I am," she said naïvely. "A mind that does not range to its extremest limits is a rather dull one, isn't it?"
"It is," I admitted, laughing and crushing her hands between my own. "You are delightfully right, Thusis; you are always deliciously right. I don't know who you are except that you're the lovely and mysterious Laughing Girl. What else you may be I don't know, dearest, but you are doubtless somebody or the King of Italy wouldn't bother his clever head about you and your sister."
"He does bother, I am afraid," admitted Thusis, smiling. "I'm sorry we've been obliged to annoy him. But it couldn't be helped, because we differed, politically, with the King of Italy. And we ran away from Rome to prove to him that our conception of world-politics was right and his was wrong. And we expect him, some day, to be very grateful to us—because we really are, Clelia and I, two of his most loyal subjects."
She spoke so frankly, so earnestly, that I dared make no jest of what she said.
However, I think she saw a glimmer in my eyes, for she flushed.
"Nothing," she said, "is sacred to a Yankee. Let me go."
"Shall I tell you what is sacred to a Yankee, Thusis?" said I, retaining her hands.
"No!"