"May I take you down to dinner, Mademoiselle Lannes?" he asked.
"You may, Mr. Scott," she replied, and they walked together down the hall and the stairway into the great dining-room. Antoine, a napkin on his arm, ceremoniously held open the door for them and Suzanne showed them to opposite seats at a small table by the window.
"We have found an abundance, Mademoiselle," she said, "and you shall be served as if you were real guests."
The memory of that dinner will always be vivid in the mind of John Scott, though he live to be a hundred. Julie and he were invincible youth that always blooms anew. War and its horrors and dangers fell from them. Their sportive fancy that they were guests in the hotel and nothing ailed the world just then held true. As Antoine and his daughter served the excellent dinner that Suzanne had prepared these two found amusement in everything. The barrier of race that had been becoming more slender all the time melted quite away, and they were boy and girl looking into each other's eyes across a narrow table.
Picard and Suzanne even felt a touch of their fantastic spirits. Suzanne from the north of France, powerful in her prejudices, a Frenchwoman to the core, had viewed John from the first with a distinct hostility, softening slowly, very slowly, as time passed. It was not that she disliked his voice, his figure, his manner, or anything about him. He was a brave and true young man and he had rendered great service to the contemporary house of Lannes, but he was not a Frenchman.
But it seemed to Suzanne, as she served the courses and watched with an eye which nothing escaped, that Monsieur Jean the Scott was becoming a Frenchman—almost at least. She had seen young Frenchmen act very much as the young American was acting. The Frenchman, too, would lean forward to speak when the girl to whom he was speaking was as lovely as her Mademoiselle Julie. No, that was impossible! None other was as lovely as her Mademoiselle Julie. The glow that illumined his face was just the same, quite of the best French manner, too. She had seen people who were people and she knew. She admitted, too, that he was very handsome, with the slenderness of youth, but strong and muscular, and above all, his face was good.
Antoine with the napkin over his arm did most of the serving, and being a man the conventional differences did not seem to him so great as they did to his daughter.
"A handsome pair," he said to her.
But while willing to admit much to herself, Suzanne would not admit it to her father.
"Aye, handsome," she replied in a fierce whisper, "but not well matched. He comes from an uncivilized continent on the other side of the world, and soon he'll be going back there. I would that her brother, Monsieur Philip, were here where he ought to be. Perhaps he'd be foolish, too, because he likes the strange American, but it would relieve us of care."