“Sir, what does it all mean? Where am I?” asked Anne, drawing herself up with the native dignity that she felt to be her defence.
“In Elf-land,” he said, with a smile, as he heaped her plate.
“Speak in earnest,” she entreated. “I cannot eat till I understand. It is no time for trifling! Life and death hang on my reaching London! If you saved me from those men, let me go free.”
“No one can move at present,” he said. “See here.”
He drew back a curtain, opened first one door and then another, and she saw sheets of driving rain, and rising, roaring waves, with surf which came beating in on the force of such a fearful gust of wind that Peregrine hastily shut the door, not without difficulty. “Nobody can stir at present,” he said, as they came into the warm bright room again. “It is a frightful tempest, the worst known here for years, they say. The dead-lights, as they call them, have been put in, or the windows would be driven in. Come and taste Hans’s work; you know it of old. Will you drink tea? Do you remember how your mother came to teach mine to brew it, and how she forgave me for being graceless enough to squirt at her?”
There was something so gentle and reassuring in the demeanour of this strange being that Anne, convinced of the utter hopelessness of confronting the storm, as well as of the need of gathering strength, allowed herself to be placed in a chair, and to partake of the food set before her, and the tea, which was served without milk, in an exquisite dragon china cup, but with a saucer that did not match it.
“We don’t get our sets perfect,” said Peregrine, with a smile, who was waiting on her as if she were a princess.
“I entreat you to tell me where we are!” said Anne. “Not in France?”
“No, not in France! I wish we were.”
“Then—can this be the Island?”