Page:Harold Macgrath--The girl in his house.djvu/77

 if there was any color to the heat in his cheeks.

"Afraid? A little. But that doesn't matter. Three essentials in life my father has taught me—I might say, drummed into me—to fight fear, to love truth, and never to miss an opportunity to do a kind act. Your lawyer was very nice to me. He came one afternoon to see if everything was all right. I kept him to tea. He was such a funny little old man, just like a character out of Dickens, or an Italian manikin that had been left out in the rain overnight."

"That's Bordman to a dot!"

The girl's voice was exquisite. She had spoken Italian so long that her English had queer little twists to it, unexpected inflections, and her laughter, light and happy, rippled like a Sicilian shepherd's reed. Living in his home, moving among and touching those objects he had loved in the past and still had a mighty craving to see! It was all like some impossible, if alluring, dream. And where, in the name of Michelangelo, were those mortgages?

"Do you still ride?" he asked, presently. Interruptions came occasionally to break in