"There was chicken—" he remembered petulantly, "I like that cold—"
"It was vairee good—" Felicia assured him. Just to hear Felicia say "Vairee" mouthing it as Mademoiselle D'Ormy had done, was refreshingly different. "Babiche had the skin and the bones and I had the rest. We stole it, you know—"
Her confession was deliciously funny, her eyes danced laughter though her tone was demurely proper. She was really thinking of Maman lying so lovely in her bed and she was thinking how Maman had talked about amusing people when they were worried and she was thinking that this dreadful old man was the most worried looking person she had ever seen.
His grizzled hand jammed another pillow feebly behind his shoulders.
He glared at her.
"Well, well, Miss—Whadda-you-call-it," he was growing more peevish.
"You'll have to find something for me—"
Her smooth hand stretched toward him as quickly as a prestidigitator's, with the glass of orange juice. He was too surprised to do anything save drink it, gulping it throatily and handing back the glass with a grunt.
"And of course," added Felicia with perfect good humor, "I shall have to pay a forfeit—I always did when I took anything from Maman's tray. If I was caught."
Her childishness of manner did not seem at all incongruous to him. She was comfortably ageless so far as he was concerned, a drab figure with a pleasant voice who treated him as though he were a human being instead of a sick ogre. In some mysterious way her attitude suggested something that no one had suggested to him for years—the thing called play!
"Forfeits for Maman," she continued, "meant I had to play chess—you don't play chess do you?"
He sat bolt upright. His beady eyes gleamed with excitement.