So he helped Miss Anne to lay the cloth on the gate-legged oak table in the parlour and to set it out with bread and butter and the end of a tinned tongue and a couple of bottles of stout. After which they went back to the little kitchen, where in a kind of giggling awe she watched him shred the bacon and break the eggs with his thin, skilful fingers and perform his magic with the frying-pan and turn out the great golden creation into the dish.
“Now,” said he, pulling her in his enthusiasm, “to table while it is hot.”
Miss Anne laughed. She lost her head ever so little. The days had been drab and hopeless of late and she was still young; so, if she felt excited at this unhoped for inrush of life and colour, who shall blame her? The light sparkled once more in her eyes and the pink of her naturally florid complexion shone on her cheek as they sat down to table.
“It is I who help it,” said Aristide. “Taste that.” He passed the plate and waited, with the artist’s expectation for her approval.
“It’s delicious.”
It was indeed the perfection of omelette, all its suave juiciness contained in film as fine as goldbeater’s skin.
“Yes, it’s good.” He was delighted, childlike, at the success of his cookery. His gaiety kept the careworn woman in rare laughter during the meal. She lost all consciousness that he was a strange man plunged down suddenly in the midst of her old maidish existence—and a strange man, too, who had once behaved in a most outrageous fashion. But that was ever the way of Aristide. The moment you yielded to his attraction he made you feel that you had known him for years. His fascination possessed you.
“Miss Anne,” said he, smoking a cigarette, at her urgent invitation, “is there a poor woman in Beverly Stoke with whom I could lodge?”
She gasped. “You lodge in Beverly Stoke?”
“Why yes,” said Aristide, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. “I am engaged in the city from ten to five every day. I can’t come here and go back to London every night, and I can’t stay a whole week without my little Jean. And I have my duty to Jean. I stand to him in the relation of a father. I must help you to nurse him and make him better. I must give him soup and apples and ice cream and——”