“It is pleasanter to eat out of doors,” he said. “I didn’t consult your wishes, because I knew it was unnecessary to do so. And even if you preferred breakfasting inside it would not be good for you.”
“I am satisfied with your choice,” she answered, smiling, and took off her hat and dropped it on the floor. “I could eat anywhere; I am so hungry.”
“Good!” he exclaimed, looking pleased, and surveying her across the narrow table, which the housewife had spread with a much-darned snow-white cloth.
It gave him an odd satisfaction to see her there, seated opposite to him, hatless and very much at her ease, a pleasing picture of fresh bright girlhood, with the glow of returning health showing in her cheeks.
The woman came out from the house and made further preparations towards their meal. Occasionally she addressed a remark to Hallam; but she was not loquacious. She stared a good deal at his companion: it doubtless caused her surprise to see him with any one. During all the months since he first came to her house he had never brought a friend with him before. She was obviously familiar with Hallam’s requirements. Without consulting him she placed a glass of milk on the table beside him, and inquired whether the lady drank tea or coffee. Esmé looked at the glass of milk and made up her mind quickly.
“Neither. I will have milk also,” she said.
The woman departed with the order, and the girl and the man sat gazing out on the sunny road and saying nothing. But the silence which hung between them was the silence of comradeship. There was an absence of all constraint in their manner; they were like old friends between whom speech is unnecessary.
With the arrival of breakfast the girl drew her chair nearer the table, and served the omelette and passed his plate across to Hallam; assisting him unobtrusively, because of the shaking of his hands and his pitiful consciousness of it. The sight of those nervous unsteady hands hurt her. She was always painfully aware of them and keenly anxious to conceal the fact. She observed that the man endeavoured to control their trembling, and that his inability to do so distressed him. He bent low over his plate. It was this habit of bending over his meals and of looking down when he walked which caused the stoop of the shoulders, giving him an appearance of ill health.
While she ate and attended to his needs and her own she wondered about him. What could be the secret of his downfall? Life had been generous to him in some respects; possibly in other, more important matters, it had treated him ill. She continued her study of him while she sat at the little table opposite to him and watched the sunlight slowly encroaching on the patch of shade in which they breakfasted. Before they had finished their meal it had reached Hallam, dividing them like a curtain of fire which wrapped him about in its radiant warmth and left her in the shadows.
“Hadn’t you better move your seat?” she suggested. “The sun strikes on your head.”