“Why didn’t you halt when I ordered you?” she demanded, fixing a pair of dark, glittering eyes on me.
I looked at her with amazement. She was dressed in a tight-fitting body, with a long skirt, which she held up in one hand, whilst she grasped a small revolver in the other. On her head was a large garden hat which threw so dark a shadow over her face that I could master no more of its details than the keen bright eyes. Could this be my cousin Theresa?
I was so much astonished by the report of the pistol, and her peremptory address, that I quite forgot my manners. I had hastily put my hat on, and there I kept it. “You may bless your stars,” she exclaimed, “that I didn’t take the curl out of your mustache with a pistol ball. I could do it. Do you doubt me? Turn your face round, so that I get your profile.”
And she levelled her pistol full at my head.
“Who are you?” I stammered; “and what do you mean to do? Put that pistol down. Don’t you know that you can’t play with a more dangerous toy?”
“Turn your face round as I order you, sir,” was her answer.
“I shall do no such thing,” I said, picking up my carpet bag, which I had dropped, but furtively watching her movements with indescribable anxiety.
“Oh,” she exclaimed, to my inexpressible relief, turning the muzzle of the pistol aside, “if you are afraid, that is another matter. However, for the future, when I order you to stop, I should advise you to do so.”
And so saying, she wheeled round, and disappeared among the trees.
I hastened forward, not doubting for a moment that, whether she was my cousin or not, she was not in possession of her reason, and congratulating myself on what I could not but consider a very narrow escape of my life. In a few moments I reached the house, a fine old building with a great door and many windows, the upper ones hooded, and a broad carpet of grass all round it, on to which the queerest little doors opened, with large bow-windows on the ground-floor.