“It is lovely!” the Signora exclaimed, and looked admiringly after the lady as she tripped down the stone stairs, holding her rustling robes up about her.
Going back, she found Mr. Coleman and Bianca trying to entertain the rather stupid lady companion, Isabel taking her first lesson in mathematics, and the girl baroness, a dark, plain, talkative little creature, chatting away in very good English to Mr. Vane.
“I never saw my husband but once,” she said. “We were always betrothed since we were babies, but his father, the old Baron of Santa Cruz, had him sent to school in Lisbon, and I was always in a convent. My mamma was dead, and I had no brothers nor sisters, and papa was in Egypt. He has a high office there. Then Pedro came home from Portugal, and I went to papa. Two years ago we met in Rome and were married, so that I could go to him later with my companion. Papa couldn’t leave to go to the Azores, and Pedro couldn’t come again for me.”
She told the story in a very childish, simple way, and seemed to regard her marriage as quite a business-like and proper arrangement.
“You think that you will like Fayal as well as Cairo?” Mr. Vane asked kindly, pitying this child-wife who seemed to have so little of family affection to surround her in the most important time of her life.
“I cannot think, I cannot remember it,” she said. “When I try, it is Paris or Rome that comes up, and I get confused. If I should not like it, I shall ask Pedro to take me somewhere else. He has written me that he will always do everything I wish him to do.”
Mr. Vane scarcely felt a disposition to smile at this perfect trust. He found it pathetic.
“But I would like to go to your country,” she resumed with animation. “Pedro’s sister Maria went
there for a journey when she married, and she wrote me the most wonderful things. Perhaps she did not tell the truth. She may have been writing something only to make me laugh. You will not laugh if I tell you?”
Mr. Vane promised to maintain his gravity at all risks.