Nevertheless, he sat down listlessly enough at an unoccupied table, and a pretty maid, in a dress daintier and fresher than that of the other attendants, instantly stood beside him with her hands clasped modestly before her.
"I wait my lord's commands," she said, in excellent French.
Without giving the matter any consideration, Wat ordered a bottle of old Rhenish, and sat back to contemplate the scene at his ease. Officers of every regiment in the services of the States-General and of its allies were there, young attachés of the embassies, stray princelings of the allied German duchies; while scattered among these were to be seen a parti-colored crowd of ladies with flower-decked hair, lavish of shoulder, opulent of charm.
Presently the pretty maid brought Wat his bottle of Rhenish, ancient and cobwebbed. She decanted it carefully, standing close by his shoulder, so that a subtle suggestion of feminine proximity affected the young man strangely. She poured out a full measure of the scented vintage into a huge green glass on which tritons gambolled and sea-nymphs writhed.
"You have, perchance, no one to drink with you?" she said, giving him a glance out of her large and lustrous eyes.
"Truly," replied Wat, "I am alone!"
And the sadness of his life seemed to culminate in a kind of mimic and desperate isolation as he spoke.
"Then," said the girl, "may I not drink first to your beautiful eyes, my captain, and then, if you will, to our better acquaintance?"
She lifted the glass to her lips, tasted it as a bird does, and presented it to Walter with the daintiest gesture.
"Your name?" he said, looking at her with a certain tolerant and almost passive interest.