“Your supposition is correct, Michael,” she said airily, but out of the corner of her eye she saw him smiling to himself over the growing heap of half-pint tins, and reddened with mortification at her naiveté in the matter.
She looked at the vat of terra-cotta purée with considerable dismay when she had stirred in the last measure of cream. Twenty-five pints of tomato bisque is a rather formidable 117 quantity of a liquid the chief virtue of which is its sparing and judicious introduction into the individual diet scheme. Nancy hardly felt that she wanted to be alone with it.
“They’ll soon lick it all up, and be polishing their plates like so many Tom-cats,” Michael said, indicating their potential patronage by waving his hand toward the courtyard. “Here comes Miss Betty, now. She’ll be after lending a hand in the cooking.”
“Keep her away, Michael,” Nancy cried; “go out and head her off. Make her go up-stairs and sit with Gaspard,—anything, but don’t let her come in here. If she does I won’t answer for the consequences. I’ll—I’ll—I don’t know what I’ll do to her.”
“Throw her in the soup kettle, most likely,” Michael chuckled. “Faith, an’ I never saw a woman yet that wasn’t ready to scratch the eyes out of the next one that got into her kitchen.”
“She isn’t safe,” Nancy said darkly. “I need every bit of brain and self-control I have to put this luncheon through. You keep Miss Betty’s mind on something else—anything but me and the way I am doing the cooking.”
“’Tis done,” said Michael; “sure an’ I’ll protect her from you, if I have to abduct her myself!”
“I wish he would,” Nancy said to herself viciously, “before she gets another chance at Collier Pratt.—Creamed chicken and mushrooms. It’s a lucky thing that Gaspard diced the chicken last night, and fixed that macédoine of vegetables for a garnish.—She’s a dangerous woman; she might wreck one’s whole life with her unfeeling, histrionic nonsense.—I wonder if thirteen quarts of cream sauce is going to be enough.”
It turned out to be quite enough after the crises in which the butter basis got too brown, and the flour after melting into it smoothly seemed unreasonably inclined to lump again as Nancy stirred the cold milk into it, but the result after all was perfectly adequate, except for the uncanny brown tinge that the whole mixture had taken on. Nancy was unable to restrain herself from taking a sample of it to Gaspard’s bedside.