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Sergius Thord, grasping the situation from the first, rushed out of the Opera-house in all haste, anxious to avert a catastrophe, but he was too late to stop the frenzied crowd, nothing could, or would have stopped them at that particular moment. The fire had been too long smouldering in their souls; and Pequita, like a little spark of fury, had set it in a blaze.
He put aside the jewel, and Pequita kissed his hand impulsively, as impulsively she kissed the lips of her friend Lotys and then came the general dispersal and break-up of the assembly. "Tell me;" said Sergius Thord, catching Leroy's hand in a close and friendly grasp ere bidding him farewell; "Are you in very truth in personal danger on account of serving our Cause?"
Leroy filled the glass he held out to him. The glances of the company told him Zouche was 'on, and that it was no good trying to stem the flow of his ideas, or check the inconsequential nature of his speech. Lotys had moved her chair a little back from the table, and with both arms encircling the child, Pequita, was talking to her in low and tender tones.
Pequita disappeared for a moment, and returned divested of the plain rusty black frock she had worn, and merely clad in a short scarlet petticoat, with a low white calico bodice her dark curls tumbling in disorder, and grasping in her right hand a brightly polished, unsheathed dagger.
He looked ill and exhausted, like a man who had passed through a violent paroxysm of fever. "You are a good child, Pequita!" he was saying softly; "Try to be always so! it is difficult but it is easier to a woman than to a man! Women have more of good in them than men!" "How about the dance?" suggested Thord; "The hour is late, close on midnight and Lotys must be tired."
"And who will see you home, Lotys?" enquired Thord. "May I for once have that honour?" asked Pasquin Leroy. His two companions stared in undisguised amazement, and there was a moment's silence. Then Lotys spoke. "You may!" she said simply. There was another silence while she put on her hat, and wrapped herself in her long dark cloak. Then Thord took Pequita by the hand. "Good-night, Lotys!"
Triumphant, reckless, panting, scarcely knowing what she did in her excitement, Pequita, suddenly running backward, with the lightness of thistle-down flying before the wind, snatched the flag of the country from a super standing by, and dancing forward again, waved it aloft, till with a final abandonment of herself to the humour of the moment, she sprang with a single bound towards the Royal box, and there the youthful incarnation of living, breathing passion, fury, patriotism, and exultation in one, dropped on one knee, the flag waving behind her, the dagger pointed straight upward, full at the King!
"No!" was the reply, given brightly, and with an upward glance of the dark eyes. "That is right! Pasquin Leroy my friend! this is Pequita, the child we told you of the other night, the only daughter of Sholto. She will dance for us presently, will you not, my little one?"
He had trusted the man in many ways and found him honest. One trifling proof of this was perhaps the main reason of Thord's further reliance upon him; he had fulfilled his half-suggested promise to bring the sunshine of prosperity into the hard-working, and more or less sordid life of the little dancing-girl, Pequita.
"But to be the 'fashion'! Bah! I do not belong to the Trade-ocracy! Nobody becomes the 'fashion' nowadays unless they have cheated their neighbours by short weight and falsified accounts! Good-night! You might be the King from your looks; but you have something better than kingship Heart! Good-night, Pequita! You danced well! Good-night, Lotys! You spoke well!
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