With one last twirl and a deep bow to an imaginary audience, Sobrinini brought her weird performance to an end. She grinned toothlessly at the staring boy, and skipped lightly to the edge of the platform.
“Ha, Bartow, like you Sobrinini in the dance that charmed all Paris?” she chirped, patting Bomba’s shoulder coquettishly. “Sobrinini has not lost her art. How say you, Bartow?”
Bomba felt that he must keep her in good humor with him if he were to gain that information about himself for which he had risked so much. He had already learned something—or guessed something. Perhaps he could learn more.
“I like your dance,” he told her gravely. “But I like best the song that Bartow’s wife sang when—when——”
“When Bonny was born?” prompted the old woman, and without waiting for a reply began to hum again that tender melody that had found its way to the depths of Bomba’s heart.
It thrilled the boy again more strangely than before. When the song was done, emotion conquered Bomba’s caution, and he flung out his hands to Sobrinini, begging her to tell him what she knew about Bartow, about Bartow’s wife, about the child that she had called Bonny.
But Sobrinini drew back from him, quick suspicion glinting in her eyes.
“No, no! Not now, Bartow, not now! It is another joke that you play on Sobrinini. No, no! To-night you will sleep here and to-morrow I will pay back your jokes with some of my own. Come! I will show you where you are to sleep.”
So saying, and mumbling to herself as she had before, the demented woman led him out of the strange room with the chairs and platform that had so bewildered the boy and down a long, dark passage.
There Sobrinini paused and clapped her hands sharply.