'Nothing more cruel was ever said of them by all their satirists,' answered Loswa. 'It will be very kind indeed if you will give me a glass of water; I need nothing else.'
'You shall have some of Catherine's cakes,' said the girl, 'and some coffee and a fresh egg. Catherine—she is our servant—makes beautiful cakes when she is not cross. Why are people who are old so often cross? Is it the trouble of living so long that makes them so? If it be that, I would rather die young. I think one ought to be like the olive-trees; the older they are the better fruit they bear.'
Then she called aloud, 'Catherine! Catherine! here is a stranger who wants some breakfast,' and ran across the bit of rough grass before the house, where cocks and hens, pigeons and rabbits, a tethered ass and a pet kid, were enjoying the fine morning together in harmony.
An old woman in a white cap showed herself for a moment in the doorway, grumbled inarticulately, and disappeared.
'She is gone to get it,' said Damaris. 'She is very cross, as I tell you, but she is very good for all that. I have known her all my life. Her honey is the best in the country. She always prays for the bees. My grandfather does not know it, but when it is swarming time she says a paternoster over each hive, and the honey comes so yellow, so smooth, so fine; its taste is like the smell of thyme. Come through the house to my terrace; you shall have your breakfast there.'
He followed her through the house, an ugly whitewashed place, with nothing of grace or colour about it, though cleaner than most such dwellings are upon the mainland; it smelt sweetly, too, from the flood of fragrant, orange-scented air which poured through past its open doors, and the odour from the bales of packed oranges which were stored in its passages and lumber-rooms, awaiting transport to the beach below. In the guest-chamber there was some old oaken furniture of which he recognised the age and value, and some chairs of repoussé leather, which would have fetched a high price; but it was all dreary, dull, stiff, and the figure of the girl, with her brilliant, luminous beauty, and her vividly-coloured clothes, looked like a pomegranate flaming in a dusky cellar.
'Come out here,' she said to him, and led him out on to a little terrace.
It was whitewashed, like all the stone of the house, but it was gay and bright. Its gallery was covered with a Canadian vine still red; it seemed to hang above the sea, so steeply did that side of the island slope downward beneath it; it had some cane chairs in it and a little marble table, a red-striped awning was stretched above it.
'This is all mine,' she said, with pride. 'You shall eat here. Take that long chair: it came off one of the great ships that go the voyages to India; the mate of the ship gave it me. I made that awning myself out of a sail. I bring my books here and read. Sometimes I sit here half the night instead of going to bed—that is, when the nightingales are singing in the orange-trees. My grandfather will always have the house-door shut and bolted by eight o'clock, even in summer. So I come here; it seems such folly to go to bed in the short nights, they are as bright as day. The time to sleep then is noon. You rest, and I will go and bring Catherine, and your breakfast.'
He caught her hand as she was about to go away.