“Now, then,” Mr. Bromley said, briskly, “if you’ve quite concluded your——”
“But I haven’t had any coffee,” Cornelia interrupted. “I always have a small cup after lunch.”
“Does your mother——”
“Mamma?” she said, appearing greatly surprised. “Oh, dear, yes. She takes it herself.”
He resigned himself, and the waitress brought the little cup; but as Cornelia conveyed the contents to her lips entirely by means of the accompanying tiny spoon, and her care not to be injured by hot liquid was extreme, he thought that never in his life had he seen any person drink an after-dinner cup of coffee so slowly. And, all the while, Cornelia, silent, seemed to be dreamily yet completely engrossed with this long process of consumption; her lowered eyes were always upon the tiny spoon. The impatient Mr. Bromley sat and sat, and finally lost his manners so far as to begin a nervous tapping upon the rugless floor with the sole of his right shoe.
This was the oddest child in the world, he thought. A little while ago she had looked at him with so intent a curious dreaminess that she had annoyed him; now she seemed to have forgotten him in her epicurean absorption in half a gill of coffee. And so he frowned, and shifted in his chair and tapped the floor with his shoe, and did not know that the tapping had grown rhythmical. For, though her eyes were lowered and her lips were silent, Cornelia was keeping time to it with a song. Each tap of Mr. Bromley’s foot was a syllable of the song.
The hours I spent with thee, dear heart,
Are as a string of pearls to me;
I count them over, every one apart——
. . . But at last her pearls were gone; the little cup was empty. “Now,” he said, “if you’ve finished, Miss Cromwell——” And he pushed back his chair decisively, rising as he did so.