This time it was two prettily attired maids who entered, each bearing a tray laden with hot dishes, which they proceeded to arrange upon the table.
“Will the little father be pleased to dine?”
The little father paid no attention, though being mightily hungry he had secretly to confess that the savour arising from the dishes was very appetising.
The maids repeated their words. Receiving no reply they glanced in surprise at each other, whispered together for a moment, and then withdrew.
“They will tell their mistress that the Englishman refuses to eat. She will come here again.”
Nor was he wrong. Ere the lapse of an hour Pauline was again in the room, and saw that the repast was cold and untouched.
“You cannot live on air.”
Wilfrid sat, the same impassive figure as before; to her eye it looked as if he had not moved a muscle since her previous visit.
She contemplated him with secret terror. This grim silence, the silence of one who seemed to have taken a vow upon him; this abstention from food, served vividly to bring to her mind an anecdote he had once told her of a certain Viking ancestor of his, who, enraged at some insult, went home, sat by his fireside, refused to take food, and so died! Was Wilfrid going to do the like?
Though secretly piqued, grieved, angered—there is no one word to describe properly her strange feeling—by Wilfrid’s manner, she could not refrain from addressing additional remarks to him, remarks whose tenor showed an interest, and even a tenderness, in his welfare.