"No. Tell me, have you anything important to do to-night?"
"No, dear, and if I had I shouldn't do it. Do you feel well enough to come out and have dinner with me somewhere? I'll take you to some place where it's quiet."
"Why not let us stay here all the evening, and have supper together?" Arithelli suggested. "We'll take Emile's things. He loves cooking cochonneries, and there is sure to be a quelque chose somewhere in the cupboard."
Vardri scrambled to his feet. "Bon! Sit still, and I'll go and acheter les—things! We'll leave Emile's cochonneries alone. I'm rich now, so we will have luxuries."
"Yes, and I'll hunt for plates and dishes, and wash them properly (not like the Gentiles do) while you go and acheter les—things!" Arithelli mocked. "What a dreadful mixture of languages we all use! I used to speak German quite well when I was at the convent, but now I have forgotten nearly all of it. This place is bad for both one's French and English, and Emile says that when I try and speak Spanish it sounds like someone sawing wood."
Vardri went out still coughing, and came back flushed and excitable, laden with various untidy parcels, from which some of the contents were protruding. Long rolls, the materials for a salad, a pâté, flowers, and an enormous cluster of grapes. They pledged each other in the yellow wine of the country, and presently Vardri set about the manufacture of what he inaccurately described as Turkish coffee. That the result of his efforts was half cold and evil-tasting mattered not to either of them.
Arithelli's red hair was crowned with vine leaves that he had stripped from the grape-cluster and twisted into a Bacchante wreath. She leant her elbow on the table, resting her chin upon her hand. Her eyes glowed jewel-like, almost the same colour as her garland. The flame of love had melted into warmth her statue-like coldness, and given her the one thing she had lacked—expression. Yet the mystery, the charm that surrounded her clung to her even when she appeared most womanly. To the boy lover gazing with devouring eyes she seemed that night more than a woman. He thought of the tales he had heard as a child from the peasants on winter nights in his own country. Tales of the forests and legends of the Hartz Mountains, of lonely places haunted by nixies and wood maidens, fairy shapes with streaming hair and vaporous robes, seeing which a man would become for ever after mad with longing, and desire no mortal woman.
Arithelli's long limbs appeared nymphlike in her plain blue high-waisted gown of Emile's choosing, that had no superfluous bow or trimming, and left free her beauty of outline. She possessed no jewellery now wherewith to deck herself, and there was no trace of artificial red on face and lips.
The candles on the table flickered to and fro in the draught from the open window and she shivered in the midst of some laughing speech and glanced over her shoulder at the door behind her.
Vardri, reading her thoughts, said, "You're afraid of something, dear, what is it?"