Signor . . . The word waked some echo in his mind. . . . The child had used it before--but what connection was groping----?
"You do not recall?" said Maria Angelina chokingly. "Though indeed, there is no reason why you should. It was but for a moment----"
She glanced up to see recognition leap amazedly into his face.
"The little Signorina! The Blairs' little Signorina!"
"Maria Angelina Santonini," she told him soberly. "Yes, that is I."
"Why of course I remember," he insisted. "A little girl in a white dress. A big hat which you took off. Your first night in America. We had a wonderful dance together----"
"And you said you would come to the mountains," she told him childishly.
He stared a moment. "Why, so I did. . . . And here I am. And here you are. To think I did not know you--I've been wondering whom you made me want to think of! But I took you for a youngster, you know, a regular ten-year-old runaway. Why, with your hair down like that---- Of course, it was absurd of me."
He paused with a smile for the absurdity of it.
Gallantly she tried to give him back that smile but there was something so wan and piteous in the curve of her soft lips, something so hurt and sick in the shadows of her dark eyes, that Barry Elder felt oddly silenced.
And then he tried to cover that silence with kind chatter as he moved about his room once more in hospitable preparation.
"It was Sandy, here, who really found you," he told her. "He whined at the door till I let him out and then he came back, barking, for me, so I had to go. I was really looking for a mink. Sandy's always excited about minks."
Maria Angelina put a hand to the dog's head and stroked it.
"I was so tired," she said. "I think I was asleep."
"I rather think you were," said Barry in an odd tone. He glanced at her white cheek with its scarlet scratch of a branch. "And I rather think you ought to be asleep now but first you must eat this and drink some more coffee."
Maria Angelina needed no urging. Like a starveling she fell upon that plate of crisp bacon and delicately fried eggs and cleaned it to the last morsel.
"I had but two bites of sweet chocolate for my dinner," she apologized.
"So you were lost before dinner--no wonder you were done in."