“It is exquisite, Lentala, and——”
“I made it all myself, from a picture in a book out of your ship! I thought you would like it. Doesn’t Annabel dress this way?”
“Yes; but in the native dress your beautiful, rich color——” I paused in my floundering for a delicate way in which to say it. “Annabel is white, you know,” I blundered.
Foreseeing my explanation, she had turned flutteringly away before my final words came, and was still holding the empty copper tray on which she had brought our breakfast. It fell with a clatter; her back was turned to me when she picked it up in confusion.
“A white woman!” She did not look at me. “Yes, she can wear dainty things and be sweet; but a brown savage woman——”
I had risen from my seat at the table and was advancing toward her. She turned and faced me defiantly, backing away, her eyes flashing. In another second, with a lightning change which showed her near kinship with Beela, she smiled sweetly, and asked with a dash of her old coquetry:
“Would you like Lentala better if she were white and pink like Annabel?”
“How could I like Lentala white more than Lentala brown, since, first and last, it is Lentala that I like?”
She frowned comically in an effort to puzzle some sense out of that speech.
“I mean,” I added, laughing at her perplexity, “that I like Lentala because she is Lentala, not because she isn’t some one else.”