"What do you find so absorbing out of the window, my dear?"
Margarita started like a forgetful child, blushed a little, murmured impatiently in French and then smiled delightfully at me.
"But this is Jerry, Miss Jencks, Roger's and my Jerry," she said beseechingly. "You do not mean that I must be polite to Jerry?"
"Most assuredly," returned Miss Jencks. "When a gentleman, even though he be an old friend, makes a journey to see one after a long absence, he expects and deserves to be entertained!"
Roger caught my eye, made his old whimsical grimace, and rooted deeper into the guide-books. Margarita sighed gently, seated herself in a high carved chair and inquired, with her lips, adorably, after my health and my journey, but laughed naughtily with her eyes, an accomplishment so foreign to my knowledge of her as to reduce me to utter banality; which suited Miss Jencks perfectly, however, so that she resigned the conversational rudder to her pupil and concerned herself with knitting a hideous grey comforter (for the Seaman's Home, I learned later), giving the occupation a character worthy the most comme-il-faut clubman.
A neat, black uniformed bonne brought in tea, in the English fashion, and Margarita served us most charmingly under the eagle eye of Miss Jencks, eating, herself, like a hungry school-girl, and stealing Roger's cakes impudently when the sometime directress of the Governor-General's household affected a well-bred deafness to her request for more. After tea Miss Jencks departed with her knitting and we three were comfortably silent; Margarita dreamy, I all in a maze at her, Roger relishing my wonder. The hyacinths smelled strong in the growing dusk, the Chinese dragons burned against the wall: colour and odour were alike a frame for her beauty and her richness. I can never wholly separate that hour in my memory from the visions of a fever and the burning heat of worse than the African Desert.
Later we sat about the candle-shaded dinner table, a meal where English service faded in the greater glory of French cooking, and I rebelled with Roger at Miss Jencks's curtailment of her charge's appetite.
"Surely, Miss Jencks, this escarole is harmless," Roger protested, with a smile at Margarita's empty plate, but when that lady repeated, nodding wisely:
"I assure you, Mr. Bradley, she is better without it," he succumbed meekly, even slavishly, I thought, and shook his head at Margarita's pleading eyes.
In the centre of the table was a graceful silver dish, filled with fruit, and as the attendant bonne left the room, Margarita, with a little cooing throaty cry, reached over to it, seized with incredible swiftness two great handfuls of the fruit, and leaping from her seat retreated with her booty to the salon. For a second she stood in the doorway, two yellow bananas hugged to her breast among the rich lace, an orange in her elbow, her teeth plunged into a great black Hamburg grape, her eyes two dark blue mutinies.