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But she may have been afraid that I might blunder into too obvious a statement, if I were permitted to continue, for she abruptly changed her tactics by saying to Brenda, "So you ran away in the middle of the dance?" "Well, we'd finished dancing, as a matter of fact," Brenda explained. Mr. Banks shifted uneasily in his chair. "Ran away, Miss Brenda?" he asked. "Did you say you'd run away?"
Gerald, who had seen as beset with difficulty the rôle of friend which he might be called upon to play, heard with relief that Giglioli had obtained leave of absence and gone to see his family. With Brenda over the seas, and Manlio in the Abruzzi, the subject of their attachment and future could fall a little into the background, crowded out by the nearer things.
"Only want to save the pater any worry I can," Jervaise said. "He has been more cut up than any one over this business." "The pater has?" queried Brenda on a note of amazement. "I shouldn't have expected him to be half as bad as the mater and Olive." "Well, he is. He's worse much worse," Jervaise asserted.
"But, look here, father," Brenda continued, turning to old Jervaise; "why do you want me to come back? We've never got on, I and the rest of you. Why can't you let me go and be done with it?" Jervaise fidgeted uneasily and looked up with a touch of appeal at his son. He had begun to mumble some opening when Frank interposed. "Because we won't," he said, "and that's the end of it.
He seemed to be given pause by this and need to gather force from reflection before going on, as he did after a moment, overcoming his repugnance. "He is the reason for poor Brenda being packed off to America." "Oh, is that it?" "He came to see me last evening and spent most of the night talking of her.
"It is that house we have called the Haughty Hermitage, Gerald," Brenda helped him. "Oh, that! But surely one doesn't live in a house like that!" "Your excellent reason?" inquired Leslie. "I don't know," he hesitated, "but surely one doesn't live in a house like that!" They had to laugh at the expression brought into his face by his sense of a mysterious incongruity.
Still, it is because Brenda is American, after all, that cruelties are being committed. Her family have taken it for granted that one of them couldn't really be in love with an Italian, least of all that joke, a dapper and decorative Italian officer that a girl buys at a fixed price for her husband. And Brenda can't say to them: 'But I am. I am in love with just such a man.
She looked up at him with the most charming insouciance when he paused so portentously at the very opening of his address. Her encouraging "yes" was rather in the manner of a child waiting for the promised story. Jervaise frowned and attempted the dramatic. "My sister, Brenda, has run away," he said. "When?" "This evening at the end of the Cinderella. You knew we were giving a dance?"
"Miss Arnold," said Henry, "permit me to introduce our quartermaster, Lieutenant Duncan and Mr. Duncan," continued the boy, "it gives me pleasure to present to you Miss Brenda Arnold." The quality, modulation, and refinement of the voice in which the girl assured me of her pleasure in meeting me, confirmed my first impression.
The "Contessina" Brenda and the San Martino girls made friends with the French girls, and the Neapolitan and his gentlemen friends flitted among them all. The Countess Brenda at first behaved somewhat stiff with Mme. Dawson and her daughters, but later she little by little submitted and permitted them to be her friends.
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