“I like to see people with good appetites, Miss Fanny,” she said in a tone which seemed to imply that appetites were perhaps a slight mitigation of the sadness of existence. “Try the cup cakes; they are nice to-night.—Why, Miss Aimée, you are not eating anything!”
“I am not hungry, Mrs. Shreve,” replied Aimée, who could not say that she was incapacitated by excitement from eating, and who looked with amazement at Fanny’s gastronomic performances. How a girl on the eve of a promised elopement, with a lover on his way to meet her, could exhibit such a keen appreciation of cup cakes and other delicacies was quite beyond Aimée’s comprehension.
Her attention thus directed to the latter, Mrs. Berrien glanced at her.
“What is the matter with you, Aimée?” she asked. “Your eyes are shining as if you had been listening to a ghost story.”
“She has been listening to a moral lecture,” said Miss Fanny, giving Aimée an admonitory touch under the table, “and she is reflecting upon it.”
“Nothing is the matter with me, Aunt Alice,” said Aimée. “I have no appetite—that is all.”
“Want of appetite is very far from being the trifling thing that most people consider it,” said an elderly gentleman on the other side of the table, who certainly himself had no ground for complaint on that score. “There is no effect without a cause, and no physical derangement which may not be attended with the most serious results. If people would only be warned in time—”
“I suppose nobody would ever die,” interposed Fanny, a little flippantly; and then, feeling that to talk of dying to a company chiefly composed of invalids was not the extreme of tact, she went on hastily: “O mamma! who do you suppose I met at the hotel to-day? Your old friend Mr. Denham, who is here for his throat—that same throat of which he has been talking ever since I can remember. I also saw the English gentlemen who are going soon on that hunting expedition which Mr. Meredith thinks of joining, and which I should like to join, too.”
“I have no doubt the party would be glad to receive you as a recruit, Miss Berrien,” said one of the ladies with a smile. “At least it is easy to answer for one member of it.”
“Yes, I think I might count on his vote,” returned Miss Berrien, composedly.