He laughed. "What a wonderfully sagacious little mother! your perceptions are correct as far as you see, but you don't see far enough. I confess to some disturbance somewhere, but not in the upper works, as you suppose. His worship the burgermeister's mild punch is brewed with far too careful a consideration of the tender years of upper tertia, to do much mischief among us other fellows. Altogether, the refreshments affect the sober system, and I am afraid your provender here will have to suffer for it I abominate the trash and sweet-stuff they feed a fellow with at parties. Come, little mother, just give us a spoonful more rum in this tea, and cure one giddiness with another. For, as I said before, there is something wrong about me. I am hard hit."
He looked at her in mock distress, with a saucy sparkle in his deep blue eyes. "Walter," she began, in some dismay, "what have you been about? I trust you have not----?"
The young fellow helped himself to a slice of bread and meat, and fell to his supper with a ponderous gravity, that was meant to cover a shade of embarrassment.
"I suppose no man can escape his fate," he said, chewing away with prosaic complacency, "sooner or later, there always must be a first time; and when a fellow comes to be nineteen, it becomes an affair of amour propre to do as others do, and fall in--" he hesitated and she laughed.
"In love?--I do believe this foolish fellow is trying to persuade himself and me, that he has fallen in love!"
"No less;" returned the lad, swallowing the tea she had poured out for him at a gulp; "I am afraid there is every symptom of that fatal malady."
"Most prominent symptoms: a very unusual appetite; and twelve bars of a valse, sung so false, as to make the very muscle model in the corner stop his ears, if he could move his hands. May I enquire to whom these miracles are to be attributed?"
A sly look of mystery came over his bright face; of which indeed the chief charm was this first freshness and frankness of early youth.
"Guess," he said; "you see at present I am too intent on filling my mouth, for any very coherent confession to come out of it."
And he fell to work again, and filled his plate, and cut large pieces off a bright pink ham. She had drawn her arm-chair close to the table, and looked quietly into his eyes.