He laughed again; Max laughed; the little Jacqueline laughed, and ran to the door.
"Oh, la! la! What a pair of children!" She flitted out of the room, returning with two cups, which she set beside the coffee and the milk.
"And now, messieurs, it is possible you can arrange for yourselves!" She shot a bright, quizzical look from one to the other. "I know you would wish me to stay and measure out the milk and sugar, and it would flatter me to do so, but, unhappily, I have a dish of some importance upon my own fire, and it is necessary that one is domestic when one is only a woman—is it not so, Monsieur Max?" She wrinkled her pretty face into a grimace of mischief, and nodded as if some idea infinitely amusing, infinitely profound lurked at the back of her blonde head.
"Good-day, Monsieur Edouard. Good-day, Monsieur Max!"
"Strange little creature!" said Blake, as the door closed upon her. "Frail as a butterfly, with one capacity to prevent her taking wing!"
"And that capacity—what is it?" Max had returned to his former position, and was pouring out the coffee as he crouched comfortably by the fire.
"The capacity, boy, for the grande passion. Odd that it should exist in so light a vessel, but these are the secrets of Nature! There are moments, you know, when this little Jacqueline isn't laughing at life—rare, I admit, but still existent—and then you see that the corners of her mouth can droop. She may live to find existence void, but she'll never live to find it shallow. Thanks, boy!" He took his cup of coffee, and, walking to the table, cut a slice of bread, which he carried back to the fire. "Now, don't say a word! I'm going to make you the finest bit of toast you ever saw in your life!"
Max, preserving the required silence, watched him make the toast, carefully balancing the bread on the tip of a knife, carefully browning, carefully buttering it.
"Now! Taste that, and tell me if there wasn't a great chef lost in me!"
He carried the toast back to the fire and watched Max eat the first morsel.