Aureole did not pass the mustard. But said very quietly, in tones eloquent of suppressed meaning: “You will discover that it is not always wise to play the fool, mon ami!”... and an echo from a far-away world of shams and introspections and problem plays, mingled strangely with the impatient music overhead; for the wind, with the perversity of winds, had elected to blow fresh and hard from the instant they moored the boat; and like the crack of whips was the sound of the sail flapping against restraint.
“Wild-duck paste, Mrs. Strachey?” demanded Stuart, scattering her preoccupation.
If Oliver had apprehended a tithe of what lay beneath her reply, he would not have continued hammering so contentedly at the glass tongue.
“Wild duck.... Yes, indeed I will have wild duck.”
“‘Crosse and Blackwell’s Wild Duck,’” Stuart read from the tin in passing it. “It has a pathetic tone, as if it were their pet, their only wild duck; the one that Crosse caught in the grounds with a butterfly net, and Blackwell pounded into paste, and Crosse wept and said he never loved a dear gazelle to glad him with its soft black eye——”
Stuart was talking hectically; there was a look in Aureole’s soft brown eye, meditating upon the nebulous-tinted mess smeared upon her bread, that positively alarmed him. “I don’t mind symbolism as a rule; but when it comes to symbolism in potted paste——”
Aureole smiled all the way home; a smile beside which Mona Lisa’s celebrated grimace paled to inanity. But the two men, beating in a foul wind and against the tide, had no time to spare from ‘Faustina,’ who was certainly behaving a great deal more like a Tyke than a lady.
On arrival at the bungalow, Aureole announced that she had run short of stores, and must walk down to the village before she could provide them with supper.
“I’ll go with you, dear.”
“I prefer to go alone.”