"Where did you get those big angel eyes from? Stole them from some
picture of the Madonna, I'll swear."
By this time I had concluded that he was not worth speaking to, so I
turned my head and I was looking back at the sea, when I heard him say:
"I suppose you are going to give me a kiss, you nice little woman,
aren't you?"
"No."
"Oh, but you must--we are relations, you know."
"I won't."
He laughed at that, and rising from his seat, he reached over to kiss
me, whereupon I drew one of my hands out of my muff and doubling my
little mittened fist, I struck him in the face.
Being, as I afterwards learned, a young autocrat, much indulged by
servants and generally tyrannising over them, he was surprised and
angry.
"The spitfire!" he said. "Who would have believed it? The face of a nun
and the temper of a devil! But you'll have to make amends for this, my
lady."
With that he went away and I saw no more of him until the steamer was
drawing up at the landing stage at Liverpool, and then, while the
passengers were gathering up their luggage, he came back with Father
Dan, and the tall sallow man who was his guardian, and said:
"Going to give me that kiss to make amends, or are you to owe me a
grudge for the rest of your life, my lady?"
"My little Mary couldn't owe a grudge to anybody," said Father Dan.
"She'll kiss his lordship and make amends; I'm certain."
And then I did to the young Lord Raa what I had done to Aunt Bridget--I
held up my face and he kissed me.
It was a little, simple, trivial incident, but it led with other things
to the most lamentable fact of my life, and when I think of it I
sometimes wonder how it comes to pass that He who numbers the flowers of
the field and counts the sparrows as they fall has no handwriting with
which to warn His children that their footsteps may not fail.