"Drink your tea," she bade, "and eat your toast before I make you tell me if you have come to see me as a messenger."
"And if I have?"
It was delicious tea, and the American of her had somehow found cream for it, which, un-English luxury, the American in him fully appreciated. The liquid in the blue-and-white cups was pale as saffron and the toast was a feather.
"At five o'clock there's nothing like it in the world," he breathed. "I didn't hope for this to-day. I had recklessly thrown five o'clock over, for I'm alone at the castle." He drank his tea, finished, and with a sigh. Then he said: "I can actually venture to ask you for another cup, for I am nobody's messenger or envoy, my dear, nobody's. I'm just an indiscreet, humdrum individual who has been too charmingly rewarded for an intrusion. You saw my surprise, didn't you? And I'm not very clever at putting on things."
The Duchess tacitly accepted, it is to be supposed, for she made him a second cup of tea, slowly.
"You don't know that I've been thinking about you all day," he said, "and I can frankly say that I've been making a very different picture of you indeed."
She took no notice whatsoever of his personality.
"You are in England, then," she said rather formally. "I never think of my own country people as being here. I always think of Americans as being in the States, men above all, for they fit so badly in the English atmosphere, don't they? It's always incongruous to me to hear their "r's" and "a's" rattling about in this soft language. It's horrid of me to speak so. You, of course, are out of the category. But as you stood there, with Banshee's nose over your shoulder you fitted quite beautifully in with everything. I don't believe I should mind you, ever, anywhere, and yet I more naturally think of you at Newport, don't you see?"
Her companion cried: "Oh, no, I'm in England, and you can't alter the fact, at least if you can, please don't; for Newport on the fifteenth of December, and with no such tea or fire——"
"Oh," she permitted, "you may stay. I said you fitted—only——"