He looked at her, rapt, his hands idle on the table, absorbing her passionately. Not an eyelash flickered until he released her with a long sigh, and then, as it were, floated up to the surface of common things once more.
“There was never any one like you, never will be!” he said slowly. “You know, you feel without telling. You’re the thing you seem. Who told a girl like you how goddesses look when they have lit on earth and find themselves betrayed?”
She smiled and shook her head. That was a secret to herself, but she knew her nature responsive as Æolian strings to a breeze; never a vibration passed over her from man or thing but waked its sister-echo in her heart.
“I think often you’d have been a great actress,” he said in his slow way, as she got the papers off the table, laying them neatly on the ground to be replaced exactly in the same order. She went to the corner cupboard where he kept his loaf, set the kettle on the shabby little stove, and while it heated, fixed the saucepan beside it and got out her eggs and butter and cakes, and, full of deft housewifely cares, spread his scanty cups and spoons on the table, and made ready the little meal for two; and put the teapot on and the steaming eggs, and so set him down and herself beside him and was ready for talk.
He watched her, fascinated. Those studio meals were not infrequent and always they were his delight. He was to remember them with an ache nothing could cure when she had taken her beauty and kindness to a land strange and far, where she was the adored of many but to none the star of hope, the golden Dawn she had become to him. But to-day was to-day, and the future veiled, and he smiled as she pulled up the cracked chair, too uncertain for his weight, and perched herself on the edge.
“Two eggs for each of us!” says she. “And those cakes, Mr. Romney, they’re fine! We got the recipe, mother and me, from an old Scotchie that came from Edinburgh. They just melt in your mouth as crisp as fritters. And then I’ll mend that hole in your sleeve if you’ll slip off your coat. And I’ll tell you my troubles.”
The soothing sunshine of her presence! He ate mechanically at first and then with keen enjoyment. Indeed, the little saucepan went on again, but this time for scrambled eggs with a flick of the sauce he kept to season his daily mutton chop when time failed him for the chophouse.
“Food for the gods!” he called it, and left the plate so clean that she declared she might almost spare herself the trouble to wash it up. And then she whipped off his coat and set to with her needle.
“There’s never a thing you do but what makes a picture!” he said with eyes that could not be satisfied. “Now—the way you sit, the light falling on the curls above your ear—ah, well! The troubles, child, the troubles. What are they?”
“My temper, as usual,” says she, stitching for dear life. “Mr. Romney, I can scarce look you in the face for fear you’ll despise the fool that can govern herself no more than a child. I do improve—God knows I try hard enough—but still ’twill out when Greville or another vexes me, even though I know I pull down my shelter with my own hands. And for nothing that matters a brass farthing! To-day I was late and he flung it in my face, any man would, and I must needs answer back, and off he went to his grand friends.”