Page:Weird Tales Volume 5 Number 4 (1925-04).djvu/97

 reason did not give me pleasure. Instead., I felt as if something unbenign lay hidden behind the Princess Tchernova’s apparent interest in the two children. I wondered if her own impulsive, cruel nature, as I had seen it illustrated that other evening when she thought herself unobserved, drew her to the two children, children disliked by everyone on the street and in the neighborhood for their bad dispositions.

“Minna shall come to my house this evening.” purred the princess, “and I shall have for her a very big box of sweets, but she must give half of them to Alice.”

Minna laughed throatily and threw a self-conscious look at me.

"I can’t come. Princess Tchernova” (her childish tongue tripped over that outlandish name) “because my Aunt Portia’s big dogs might bite me the way they did O’Brien.”

“Mr. O'Brien, darling,” corrected her mother primly.

“Your Aunt Portia’s dogs didn’t bite Mr. O’Brien,” I put in at this point, determined not to let that story go any farther if I could prevent it.

"Oh, chre Aunt Sophie, what a loyal heart is yours!” sighed the Russian, turning those green shining eyes full upon me. “How nobly you try to shield the savage beasts of Mrs. Differdale! But why?”

“Why, princess? Because I’ve had Boris out with me on the leash and I’ve seen both dogs around the house every day. They sleep in my room or Portia’s half the time. They’re as gentle as babies and as sweet-dispositioned, ” I retorted.

“But then,” hesitated she prettily, again with that pointed tongue lapping her deep red lips, “you must know Mrs. Differdale very well indeed, that she let you enter her so-mysterious house of many secrets. I thought you were the Aunt Sophie of my Ow-een!”

There! How was that for sheer nerve on her part? She rested her green eyes on me with a kind of amused smile flickering over her dead-white face, a smile that said much to the contrary of what her lips uttered.

“I am Mrs. Differdale’s aunt, her father’s sister,” said I, pointedly. “And I consider myself in a position to deny spiteful rumors about such magnificent beasts as Boris and Andrei.”

“The aunt of the mysterious Mrs. Differdale? A-ah, that explain everything. Vraiment!”

She brushed away my denial, my explanation, with a little wave of her gemmed fingers. I was furious, but there was nothing more for me to say at the moment. I took the cup of tea Mrs. Arnold offered, and sipped it hurriedly. I like my tea with sugar and lemon, and my hostess had asked if I wanted cream.

When they asked the princess she cried at once: “No sugar, please! I do not like the sweet things. Sweet things are for dear little plump girls. The plain tea, please, without anything.”

“No sugar? No milk?” cried Aurora.

“Cream.” corrected the mother in an undertone, looked up, caught my eye and colored.

“Nothing, kind friends, but the plain tea. No, thank you, no cakes. The doctor he do not permit sweet cakes for the poor Irma, who must do what she is order.”

I made a mental note of these preferences and dislikes, thinking that it might interest Portia, who seemed to find such weighty matter in my most trifling reports.