“How good you are!” she remarked, placing a rather soiled cloth, which she found somewhere, over a battered trunk.
“I try not to be, but I can’t help it!” answered the poet modestly.
“No; that’s it; you can’t help it!” she returned, moving lightly around the room, emptying the contents of the frying-pan––now an aromatic jumble––on to a cracked blue platter, and setting knife and fork, and a plate, also blue, before him! “And may I wait on you, too?”
“Well, as a special favor––” He paused, appearing to ponder deeply and darkly.
Her eyes were bent upon his face with mute appeal, 302 her suspense so great she stood stock-still in the middle of the floor, frying-pan in hand.
“Yes; you may wait on me,” he said finally, after perplexed and weighty rumination.
At that her little feet fairly twinkled, but her hand was ever so careful as she took the coffee pot from the fire and put it near the blue plate. A glass––how well she knew where everything was!––she found in some mysterious corner and, sitting down on the floor, cross-legged like a little Turk, a mere mite almost lost in the semi-obscurity of the room, she polished it assiduously upon the corner of the table cloth until it shone free from specks of dust; all the time humming very lightly like a bird, or a housewife whose heart is in her work. A strange song, a curious bit of melody that seemed to spring from some dark past and to presage a future, equally sunless.
“Your supper is ready, Monsieur,” she said, rising.
“And I am ready for it. Why, how nicely the table looks! Really, when we both grow up, I think we should take a silver ship and sail to some silver shore and live together there forever and evermore. How would you like it?”
Celestina’s lips were mute, but her eyes were full of rapturous response, and then became suddenly shy, as though afraid of their own happiness.