He tried sternly to explain his feelings and issue his commands, but as was to be expected his Italian gave way under the strain: "Troppo in ritardo punire il gatto ... it's too late to jump on the cat _now_, you poor chump; she wouldn't have any idea what it's for. Gatto non capisce ... it's not her fault anyhow. She doesn't know any better. Take her down cellar, dans la cave; she's all right catching rats. That's what she's for! And look here," he stopped his pitiful attempt at Italian and ended fiercely, trusting to a grim eye and a set jaw to make his meaning plain, "Don't you try any funny business on the cat when I'm not around, or I'll knock your heads together till you can't see." He heard the girl speak to the men in an Italian that was so rapid it made him dizzy and at the end caught the phrase, "do you understand?" The men nodded, by no means pleased at the rebuff, the boy motioned Neale to give him the cat, and carried her off carefully down the corridor. "That was the very most splendid thing for you to do," the girl said to him, with a soft energy of accent. He whirled about towards her, the immensity of his relief flooding his face. "Oh, you _do_ speak English! You're _not_ Italian!" he cried, the intonation of his phrase seeming to indicate that she had lifted from his mind an apprehension of infinitely long standing. "Oh, yes," she said, smiling and looking directly at him, "of course I speak English. I'm an American girl. My name is Marise Allen." Neale was so affected by the sweetness of her smile on him, by the softness of her shining dark eyes, that he felt himself blushing and stammering like a little boy. "M-mine is Neale Crittenden," he answered. CHAPTER XLIII The dream-like Arabian Night unexpectedness which had descended on Neale the evening before, on the roof, continued shimmeringly to wrap everything in improbability. Instead of receiving his unfamiliar name with the vague, conventional smile of a new acquaintance, the girl raised her eyebrows high in a long, delicate arch and cried out, "You are! Really! The one who has inherited Crittenden's?" Seeing Neale's look of almost appalled amazement, she broke into a sudden laugh. Neale had never heard any one laugh like that, almost like some one singing, so clear and purely produced was its little trill. And yet it had been as sudden and spontaneous as a gush of water from a spring. "I don't wonder you look astonished," she told him. "But you see when I was a little girl I used often to play in and out of old Mr. Crittenden's house and mill. I've never seen anything since in all my life that seemed as wonderful and mighty to me as the way the saw used to gnash its teeth at the great logs and slowly, shriekingly tear them apart into boards. Didn't you use to love the moss on the old water-wheel, too?"