"There is a little too much sugar in the ragoût, dear Madame Potier; otherwise it is, as Monsieur says—excellent!"
"'Sugar.' ... But one doesn't put sugar——" P. C. Breagh was beginning, when both the women turned on him and rent him, figuratively.
"Who does not put sugar? Will Monsieur answer me?"
The piercing shriek was Madame Potier's. And the silvery accents of Madame Charles took up the burden, saying:
"Dear Monsieur Breagh, the delicate brown of coloring that pleases you—the suavity that corrects the sharpness of the salt—these are due to sugar—burnt and added at the last moment. But one should use it with delicacy, or the effect is absolutely lost!"
"Can you really cook?" he asked, in his senseless, masculine fashion, smiling rather foolishly and staring at her with his honest gray eyes.
And Juliette answered with a trill of delicate, airy laughter:
"Do you find it so incredible? Well, I will not boast now, but presently—you shall see!"
Next morning, when Madame Potier returned from market, with an unusually heavy basket, Madame Charles donned a stuff apron of the good woman's, and vanished with her into the kitchen, whence their voices could be heard chattering as though a particularly shrill-voiced pea-hen were singing a duet with a reed warbler or crested wren. The twelve o'clock déjeuner was memorable, the five o'clock dinner a marvel, from the croûte au pot to the sole au gratin, and from the sole to the filet aux champignons! There were beignets afterward—crisp, adorable, light as bubbles. P. C. Breagh ate hugely, and praised, while the excellent Potier chuckled. Her work, she told herself, sat at the head of the table, in this slender creature with the wild-rose cheeks and the beaming, sparkling eyes.
Juliette had found in a trunk full of garments that had been committed by her to Madame Tessier's keeping a simple dinner dress of thin filmy black. Jet gleamed in the trimming of the skirt and polonaise, and upon the elbow sleeves and about the V-shaped neck of the bodice, the somber gleam of it threw into marvelous relief the ivory whiteness of the young, fresh skin. Her dainty slimness was emphasized by the absence of all ornament. Her marvelous black hair, fine as cobweb, silky without glossiness, crowned her chiseled temples with its dusky coils. When she lifted a slender arm to thrust in a hairpin more firmly, the sunset reflection from the sky caught the fragile hand and reddened the delicate palm of it, and the tiny nails that shone like rosy, polished shells.