"You don't see the like of that in England, do you?" he said, with his mouth full of cold chicken. "I hope, Miss Brunel, you and Mrs. Christmas will make your stay with us as long as ever you can."
"I should be very glad," she said; "but I must see what Lady Jane says in a day or two—whether she finds herself getting better. If she should prefer the cooler air of mountain scenery, we may go on to Switzerland."
"But don't you dread the idea of travelling alone—looking after your own luggage, and what not?" asked the Count, with his mouth this time full of some other animal's tongue.
"It was not entirely on a pleasure excursion we came," she said, quietly.
"And then," said Will, "you can get plenty of cool mountain air in the Black Forest. You can go and live comfortably on the top of the Feldberg, about 5000 feet high, with a dozen mountains all round you over 4000 feet. In the meantime, don't trouble yourself with thoughts of change; but let me give you some of this jelly. You are very fond of sweets, I know."
"I am. You have been watching me."
He had been watching her too much, he thought. The intense curiosity with which he had regarded the singular change in the girl's nature so soon as she left the stage, with the study of her pretty superficial carelessness, her frank audacious manner, and her quaint, maternal, matter-of-fact attitude towards himself, had wrought its inevitable work; and at the very moment when she was thinking that Mr. Anerley took a friendly pleasure in her society, he was longing to get away from it as from a torture too heavy to be borne—longing to get away, and unable to go. He might easily have avoided her on this very day, for example, by pleading business occupations; instead, he had looked with impatience for her arrival all the morning and forenoon.
And if he had any intellectual pleasure in studying the curious shades of the young actress's character, it was well that he improved his time; for this was the last day on which she should ever appear to him that enigmatical compound of a childlike gaiety and mimicry, with a matronly air which was quite as amusingly unnatural. From this period henceforth, the reader who takes the trouble to follow Annie Brunel's history will find her a changed woman—drawing nearer to that beautiful ideal which one who knew her mother would have expected to find in Annie Napier's only child.
At present she was chiefly concerned with the various sweets which Count Schönstein's cook had sent, and also in trying the effect of squeezing the juice of different kinds of fruit into the iced champagne which she sipped from time to time. She came to the conclusion that sliced apple added to champagne and iced water greatly improved its flavour; and she appealed to Grete Halm, who had tried all her different specifics, the two drinking out of the same glass. Grete began to fancy that English ladies, though they were very beautiful and had magnificent hair, were little better than children, to amuse themselves with such nonsense.
"I see that Hermann is getting dreadfully impatient," said Miss Brunel, at last; "let us go."