They hurried a little on the way to the Château, and he laughed at her appetite, which made her laugh, too, only she pretended not to like it.
At the porch she left him to change her gown, and slipped away up-stairs, while he found old Pierre and was dusted and fussed over until he couldn't stand it another moment. Luckily he heard Lorraine calling her maid on the porch, and he went to her at once.
"Papa says you may lunch here—I spoke to him through the key-hole. It is all ready; will you come?"
A serious-minded maid served them with salad and thin bread-and-butter.
"Tea!" exclaimed Jack.
"Isn't that very American?" asked Lorraine, timidly. "I thought you might like it; I understood that all Americans drank tea."
"They do," he said, gravely; "it is a terrible habit—a national vice—but they do."
"Now you are laughing at me!" she cried. "Marianne, please to remove that tea! No, no, I won't leave it—and you can suffer if you wish. And to think that I—"
They were both laughing so that the maid's face grew more serious, and she removed the teapot as though she were bearing some strange and poisonous creature to a deserved doom.
As they sat opposite each other, smiling, a little flurried at finding themselves alone at table together, but eating with the appetites of very young lovers, the warm summer wind, blowing through the open windows, bore to their ears the songs of forest birds. It bore another sound, too; Jack had heard it for the last two hours, or had imagined he heard it—a low, monotonous vibration, now almost distinct, now lost, now again discernible, but too vague, too indefinite to be anything but that faint summer harmony which comes from distant breezes, distant movements, mingling with the stir of drowsy field insects, half torpid in the heat of noon.