And, behold! she lifted up once more that hoarse, broken voice to croak with frightful glee, "Make it a good buona mancia, Signor Ben, for the sake of old times. It was Giuseppe who answered your letters: I am Antonia his wife, mother of his ten children. It should be a good, a brave buona mancia that I did not wait for you—not thirteen years, not even six months, only till Giuseppe came home from his coral-fishing."
Till her dying day the little old maid will never forget the look that settled upon his face after the first paralyzed moment in which he realized the woman's meaning. It was such a look that she hastily averted her eyes and tremblingly followed the chambermaid up the wide stone stairs.
She never saw him afterward, for he left the island that same evening. But she heard of him only last summer. He has married a sprightly girl of eighteen, and has some renown in his own country —that of being the heaviest eater, sleeper, talker and sitter of the Lotus Club.
As his friends always said, he has no sentiment, even in his pictures.
As for Miss Deane, she is no older now than then. The volatile drops in her blood effervesce as of old, and her flirtation is as desperate with that invisible adorer as if she were twenty instead of—more.
But it is true that sometimes, at long intervals, she takes a bit of yellow paper from a secret place, and her spectacles grow dim (she wears them only in private) as she reads, in a feminine hand that seems to skip and chipper all over the page, "Truly, mamma dear, he has never said a word of love to me, and yet, strange as it may seem, I am as sure that he loves me as—" Then she usually giggles, in queer, mirthless fashion, as she chirrups, "What a ridiculous little goosie I was!" before she folds the paper away for another long repose, readjusts her coquettish but scanty frizzes, and goes down stairs again to her invisible adorer and her perpetual flirtation.
And nobody hears the wail in her foolish old-young heart as she goes: "Ah, why might it not have been?"
Alas! why not?
For then she might have been less lively, and he less dead, both grown side by side into richer, fuller, sweeter ripeness for the great harvester whom we call Death.
Margaret Bertha Wright.