‘Yes,’ he answered gaily.
‘I want what you call—what is your word for it? Oh yes, I know—I want what you call a pick-me-up. Will you share a pint of wine with me? I want a glass—just one glass of champagne. I quite long for it.’
‘Why, yes,’ said Paul, ‘that is a simple matter enough,’ and he gave the order for the wine.
Annette drank the greater part of it, and began to glow and sparkle. The colour came back to her cheeks and the light to her eyes. She was unusually bright and animated, and chattered all manner of good-humoured nonsense with the juge de paix and the garde-champêtre.
‘That is your medicine, my dear,’ said Paul, in a half-whisper, tapping the bottle with a finger-nail. ‘I shall prescribe it for you daily.’
She made a little face at him and laughed. ‘I don’t like the stuff,’ she said, ‘very often, but I longed for it this morning; and, oh! I am better for it.’
They were as much at home in the Hotel of the Three Friends by this time as if they had lived there all their lives. There was no stranger present at the meal, and it was not at all a surprising thing when Annette floated away to the piano at the further end of the room and began to tinkle at the keys there. She was by no means an accomplished musician, but she played a few little airs with a sort of spontaneity and grace, and she had a sweet, thin, bird-like voice, a clear and liquid note, which was perhaps her greatest charm. She searched among the music upon the top of the piano, flicking the untidy scattered leaves until she found a song she knew.
‘Music, messieurs,’ she said, ‘is an aid to digestion; I will make a sandwich of sentiment for you—cheese on the one side, dessert on the other, and love in the middle.’
The garde and the juge and the local huissier and the bachelor chemist all beat the hafts of their knives on the table in applause, and she sang, with a vivacity and archness Paul had never before observed in her, a snatch of cheap Belgian sentimentalism:
‘Toux les deux, la main dans la main,
Nous poursuivions notre chemin,
Sous la céleste voûte;
Les doux échos mystérieux
Répéter nos baisers joyeux
Tout le long—tout le long de la route.’