Antony, stooping over the crouching figure by his side, whispered in her ear:
"I'll step down and look about a bit. There must be some way--I'll get you a coat somewhere and we can slip out. Wait here."
All was empty and silent in the laundry, but as he stopped a moment behind the door before peering out, a hand knocked gently on it and a boy's voice questioned softly.
"Are ye' there, then? Are ye, sir?" Instinctively and before he could catch back the word, Antony whispered hoarsely:
"Yes!"
"I'll be puttin' this in the durway, then, and Miss Delia Nolan said for me to say for ye to please wait an hour for her, an' she'd surely come. She does be needed in the bedrooms upstairs to watch the ladies' clothes f'r fear they'd be stolen, she says. But if ye'll wait the hour, she'll be with you, with more, maybe, if she can get it. Trust me for the horses, sir!"
There was a rattle and a thud as of some heavy object deposited on the floor in the open door, and the messenger scurried away. 105 Antony looked cautiously around the door, and as he looked his eyes grew large and round, for there before him lay a mammoth tray filled with dainties to wake an appetite in one far less famished than poor Antony. Two half-emptied bottles reared their grateful promise high in the middle, and the jellied fowl vied with the crusted croquet, the rich pâté gleamed among the feathery wheaten rolls, the lobster nestled coyly in his luscious mayonnaise, seeming indeed to blush under the young man's ardent and 106 devouring gaze. Breathlessly he lifted it, eagerly he bore it to that musty upper room, and there, with soft little cries of surprise from her and long-drawn sighs of satisfaction from him, they fell upon it. With every morsel of the food, with every throatful of the heartening, still beaded wine, courage, nay, audacity, crept softly over their jaded spirits, as the gentle but inevitable tide creeps up the beach.
"To Miss Delia Nolan!" he cried lightly, raising high his glass; "long life to her and her coachman!"
And "long life to her and her coachman!" Nette echoed, smiling from the broken chair she sat upon at Antony, who knelt before the tray. Through the chinks of the closed, dusty blinds vivid pencils of light streaked her delicate dress: she gleamed like a modish crocus in the bare lumber room. The rich viands before her, the dainty opalescence of the frozen sweet she held in a tinted, flower-shaped glass, the very dusk of the closed chamber, making her youth and loveliness more jewel-like, all enhanced the piquancy of the picture she presented. Antony's resolution flamed high in him: should such pluck, such beauty, such resource, be captured 107 now, now after all they had gone through?