Aurora smiled at the biscuits’ beautiful brown and, having broken one to test its lightness, nodded in self-approval.
“They’re all right. Now you want to put on lots of butter,” she said. “Here, that’s not near enough,” she reproved him. She reached over, took his biscuit, buttered it as she thought it should be buttered, and returned it to his 93plate; then, while eating, watched him eat with eyes that expressed her simple love of feeding up any one, man or animal, so lean as he.
There had been shining in Aurora’s eyes all this evening, when they rested on him, a look of great kindness, the consequence of knowing how badly life had treated him, and desiring that compensation should be made. He could not fail to feel that warm ray playing over his bleak surface. He could not but think what nice eyes Mrs. Hawthorne had.
When he asked her if she knew how to make many other such delicious things it became her turn to talk. Estelle here joined in, and they exalted the fare of home, affecting the fiction of having found nothing but frogs’ legs, cocks’ combs, and snails to feed upon since they struck Italy. Blueberry-pie–did Mr. Fane remember it? Fried oysters! Buckwheat cakes!
He said he remembered, but did not confess to any great emotion.
“You wait till Thursday,” said Aurora. “It’s Thanksgiving. We’re going to have chicken-pie, roast turkey, mince-pie, squash-pie, everything but cranberry sauce. We can’t get the cranberries. Will you come?”
In haste and confusion he said, alas! it would be impossible, wholly impossible, intimating that he was a man of a thousand engagements and occupations.
But after an interval, and talk of other things, he inquired, with an effect of enormous discretion, whether he might without too great impertinence ask who was coming to eat that wonderful Thanksgiving dinner which her own hands, he must suppose, would largely have to prepare.
“Just the Fosses. All the Fosses.”
“Ah, Mr. Foss will feel agreeably like the great Turk.”