“He’s had to promise me that every day since I first ordered it,” Pelleas assured me cheerfully, “five or six times, in all.”
“O,” said I, as if I had no character, “I feel as if I should faint, Pelleas.”
Three steps from the bottom I stood still and caught at his coat. Through the crack at the top of the door I could see a light in the kitchen. At the same moment an odour—faint, permeating, delicious, unmistakable—saluted us both. It was coffee.
Pelleas flung open the door and we stood making a guilty tableau on the lowest step.
The kitchen was brightly lighted and a fire blazed on the hearth. The gas range was burning and a kettle of coffee was playing its fragrant rôle. Plates, napkins, and silver were on the dresser; the boxes of ices were on the sill of the open area window; on the table stood the cakes, cut, and flanked by a tray of thin white sandwiches; the great salad bowl was ready with a little tray of things for the dressing; from a white napkin I saw protruding the leg of a cold fowl; there was the chafing dish waiting to hold something else delectable. And in the rocking-chair before the fire, wearing an embroidered white apron and waiting with closed eyes, sat Nichola.
“O Nichola,” we cried together in awed voices, “Nichola.”
She opened an eye, without so much as lifting her head.
“For the love of heaven,” she said, “it’s ’most time. The coffee’s just ready an’ Our Lady knows you’ve been havin’ a hard evenin’. Ain’t you hungry, dancin’ so? Well, go back upstairs, the both of you.”
We went. In the dark of the stairway we clung to each other, filled with amazement and thanksgiving. We could hear Nichola moving briskly about the kitchen collecting her delicacies. How had she found us out? O, and now at last was not the secret of her mysterious Thursday evenings revealed to us? She did go somewhere for lessons in magic and she had learned to read our inmost thoughts!
From above stairs came the laughter of the others, echoes of that ancient ball which we had been pretending to re-live, trading the empty past for the largess and beauty of now.