"But you are getting me so many meals," protested Maria Angelina, confronted by a small table which he had spread for two before the fireplace. Within the hearth he had kindled a small and cheerful blaze.
"I'll agree to keep it up as long as you eat them."
Swiftly Barry turned the browning ham from the iron spider into a small platter and deposited it upon the table with a flourish. Then he placed the granite coffeepot at her right hand.
"I made it with an egg," he said proudly. "Will you pour, Signorina, while I cut this? That's genuine canned cream—none of your execrable Continental hot milk for me! And I like my cream first with three lumps of sugar, please."
He smiled blithely upon her as with a deep and delicious constraint her small hands moved, housewifely, among his cups.
"These aren't French rolls," he murmured, "but I promise you that they are cold enough for a true Italian breakfast, and there is honey and there is jam—and here, Signorina, is ham, milk-fed, smoke-cured, and browned to make the best chef of Sherry's pale with envy and despair. . . . I thank you," and he accepted the cup of coffee from her hand with another direct smile that deepened the confusion of the girl's spirit.
A dream had succeeded the nightmare, a fairy tale of a dream. It was unreal . . . it was a bubble that would break . . . but it was a spell, an enchantment.
She forgot that she was tired and bruised; she forgot her stained clothes; she forgot her outrageous past and her terrifying future.
Oblivious and bewitched, she smiled across the table into Barry Elder's eyes and poured his coffee and ate his bread and jam. The amazing youth in her forgot for those moments all that it had suffered and all that it must meet. She was floating, floating in the web of this beautiful unreality.
And Barry Elder himself appeared a very different person from that bitter young man who had stared desperately into the fire and talked about cake and disillusionment. In spite of his lack of sleep there was nothing in the least haggard about his young face; he looked remarkably alert and interested in life, and his eyes were very gentle and his smile very sweet.