"Arnold," she whispered, and her voice was none too steady, "I hate that woman. I do not care if she is my aunt; and--Arnold----"
"I believe that she hates me too. She looks at me as though I were something unpleasant, as though she wished me dead. I will not go to her, Arnold. Say that I shall not."
For a moment I was silent. Her little womanish airs of the last few months, the quaint effort of dignity with which it seemed to have pleased her to add all that was possible to her years, had wholly departed. She was a child again, with frightened eyes and quivering lips, the child who had walked so easily into our hearts in those first days of her terror. To think of her as such again was almost a relief.
"Dear Isobel," I said, "the Archduchess has told me now two different stories concerning you. She appears to be very anxious to have you in her care, but her methods up to the present have been very strange. We shall not give you up to her unless we are obliged. But----"
"Please what, Arnold?" she interrupted anxiously.
"If the Archduchess is indeed your aunt, as she says she is, you must have hundreds of other relations, many of whom you would without doubt find very different people. Besides, in that case, you see, Isobel, you ought to be living altogether differently. It is absurd for you to be grubbing along with us in an attic when you ought to be living in a palace, with plenty of money and servants and beautiful frocks, and all that sort of thing. You understand me, don't you?" I concluded a little lamely, for the steady gaze of those deep blue frightened eyes was a little disconcerting.
"No, I do not," she answered. "If I am a Waldenburg and the niece of the Archduchess, why was I left alone at that convent for all those years, and who was responsible for sending that man to fetch me away--that terrible man? How are they going to explain that, these wonderful relations of mine? Oh, Arnold, Arnold!" she cried, suddenly swaying over towards me in the cab, "I don't want to leave you--all. Do not send me away. Promise that you will not!"
A child, I told myself fiercely, a mere child this! Nevertheless I was thankful for the darkness of the silent street into which we had turned, the darkness which hid my face from her. Her soft breath was upon my cheek, her beautiful head very near my shoulder. Oh, I had need of all my strength, of all my common-sense.