“Her!” he said; “are you married, then?”
“No,” laughed Bastin, “but I’ve adopted a child. But come on, man!”
The pair left the office. In the cab, talking very rapidly, Bastin gave the skeleton sketch of his wanderings, but saying no word of the promised great adventure.
Tom Hammond never forgot the first sight of his friend’s adopted child. There was a low grate in the room, a blazing fire of leaping, flaming coals in the grate. Curled up in a deep saddle-bag armchair was the loveliest girl-child Hammond had ever seen.
She must have been half asleep, or in a deep reverie, but as the two men advanced into the room she sprang from the chair, and, with eyes gleaming with delight, bounded to meet Bastin. Wreathing her arms about his neck, she crooned softly over him some tongue of her own.
She was loveliness incarnated. Her eyes, black as sloes, were big, round, and wide in their staring wonder at Hammond’s appearance. Her hair was a mass of short curls. She was dark of skin as some Spanish beauty.
Her costume lent extra charm to her appearance; for she wore a long, Grecian-like robe of some light, diaphanous ivory-cream fabric, engirdled at the waist with a belt composed of some sort of glistening peacock-green shells, buckled with frosted silver. The simple but exquisite garment had only short shoulder-sleeves, and was cut low round the throat and neck, and finished there—as were the edges of the shoulder-sleeves—with a two-inch wide band of sheeny silk of the same colour as the shells of her belt. The opening at the neck of the robe was fastened with a brooch of frosted silver of the same pattern, only smaller, as the buckle of the belt.
From beneath the silk-bound hem of her robe there peeped bronze slippers, encasing the daintiest little crimsoned-stockinged feet ever used for pedalling this rough old earth’s crust.
Bastin introduced the child. She gave Tom her hand, and lifted her wondrous eyes to his, answering his question as to her health in the prettiest of broken English he had ever heard.
A moment or two later the three friends were seated—Tom and Bastin in armchairs opposite each other, the child (Viola, Bastin had christened her) on a low stool between Bastin’s knees.