"Monsieur is served," said Thusis, in a voice so diabolically meek that I burst out laughing; and the girl, as though flinging discretion to the summer breezes, leaped to her feet with a gay little echo of my laughter and dropped down on the moss beside the woodland banquet.
"What do I care after all!" she said. "From the beginning I've been at no pains to deceive you. So in the name of the old gods let us break bread together."
She picked up a bit of bread, sprinkled a pinch of salt on it, broke it, and offered me half with a most adorable air. And we ate together under the inviolate roof of the high blue sky.
"Now," she said, "you'll never betray me."
"You knew that in the beginning."
"Did I? I don't know. I've been perfectly careless concerning you, Don Michael."
"Was it from instinctive confidence, Thusis, or out of disdain?"
The girl laughed, not looking up but continuing to poke for olives with a fork too large for the neck of the flask:
"Disdain you, Don Michael? How could I?"
"I sometimes believe you do. You behave very often as though I were a detail of the surrounding landscape and quite as negligible."