With the keen appetites they brought to it, our travellers found the fare excellent—good bread and butter, baked potatoes, ham and fresh-laid eggs.
Mr. Lord, seated between the two ladies, was very kind and attentive to both, but as usual did some absurdly absent-minded things.
"Do you really prefer salt to sugar in your coffee, Mr. Lord?" asked Mildred demurely, but with a mischievous twinkle in her eye, as she saw him draw the salt-cellar toward him and dip his teaspoon into it.
She had stayed his hand just in time. "Oh no, certainly not," he said, laughing to cover his confusion as he hastily emptied the spoon into his saucer. "It is a very pleasant evening," he remarked, sugaring his potato.
"Do you think so?" said Mildred, listening to the dash of the rain against the window, for the threatened storm had come. "Then I suppose, like the Shepherd of Salisbury Plains, you are pleased with whatever kind of weather is sent?"
"Certainly we all should be," he said. "But I was not aware till this moment that it was raining."
Mildred presently becoming interested in some talk going on between her opposite neighbors, had for the moment almost forgotten Mr. Lord's existence. She was recalled to it by a hasty movement on his part. He suddenly pushed back his chair, rose, and walked out of the room.
A glance at his saucer, half full of coffee, then at the laughing eyes of the other lady, enlightened our heroine as to the cause of his sudden exit.
"Salted coffee is not, I find, particularly palatable," he remarked, coming back and resuming his seat. "I am a sadly absent-minded person, Miss Mildred; you should watch over me and prevent such mistakes, as my mother does at home."