more cruel was ever said of them by all their satirists,' answered Loswa. 'It will be very kind indeed if you will give me a glass of water; I need nothing else.'
'You shall have some of Catherine's cakes,' said the girl, 'and some coffee and a fresh egg. Catherine—she is our servant—makes beautiful cakes when she is not cross. Why are people who are old so often cross? Is it the trouble of living so long that makes them so? If it be that, I would rather die young. I think one ought to be like the olive-trees; the older they are the better fruit they bear.'
Then she called aloud, 'Catherine! Catherine! here is a stranger who wants some breakfast,' and ran across the bit of rough grass before the house, where cocks and hens, pigeons and rabbits, a tethered ass and a pet kid, were enjoying the fine morning together in harmony.
An old woman in a white cap showed herself for a moment in the doorway, grumbled inarticulately, and disappeared.
'She is gone to get it,' said Damaris. 'She is very cross, as I tell you, but she is very good for all that. I have known her all my life. Her honey is the best in the country. She always prays for the bees. My grandfather does not know it, but when it is swarming time she says a paternoster over each hive, and the honey comes so yellow, so smooth, so fine; its taste is like the smell of thyme. Come through the house to my terrace; you shall have your breakfast there.'
He followed her through the house, an ugly whitewashed place, with nothing of grace or colour about it, though cleaner than most such dwellings are upon the mainland; it smelt sweetly, too, from the flood of fragrant, orange-scented air which poured through past its open doors, and the odour from the bales of packed oranges which were stored in its passages and lumber-rooms, awaiting transport to the beach below. In the guest-chamber there was some old oaken furniture of which he recognised the age and value, and some chairs of repoussé leather, which would have fetched a high price; but it was all dreary, dull, stiff, and the figure of the girl, with her brilliant, luminous beauty, and her vividly-coloured clothes, looked like a pomegranate flaming in a dusky cellar.
'Come out here,' she said to him, and led him out on to a little terrace.
It was whitewashed, like all the stone of the house, but it was gay and bright. Its gallery was covered with a Canadian vine still red; it seemed to hang above the sea, so steeply did that side of the island slope downward beneath it; it had some cane chairs in it and a little marble table, a red-striped awning was stretched above it.
'This is all mine,' she said, with pride. 'You shall eat here. Take that long chair: it came off one of the great ships that go the voyages to India; the mate of the ship gave it me. I made that awning myself out of a sail. I bring my books here and read. Sometimes I sit here half the night instead of going to bed—that is, when the nightingales are singing in the orange-trees. My grandfather will always have the house-door shut and bolted by eight o'clock, even in summer. So I come here; it seems such folly to go to bed in the short nights, they are as bright as day. The time to sleep then is noon. You rest, and I will go and bring Catherine, and your breakfast.'
He caught her hand as she was about to go away.
'Pray, stay,' he murmured. 'It is to hear you talk that I care; I want nothing else, not even that glass of water; I only made it an excuse to come into your house.'
She drew her hand from him and frowned a little.
'Why should you make an excuse? If you had said you wished to come I would have let you; if you do not want to eat there is nothing to come for; I am never indoors except to eat, or if it rain very heavily.'
Then she went, and he dared not detain her lest he should alarm her. She seemed to him like a bird which alights near a stranger so long as there is no movement, but at a single sound takes flight. Left alone he sat still in the chair she had assigned to him, and gazed over the sea; there was nothing except sea visible from this little terrace.
CHAPTER VIII.
In a little while she returned, bearing in her strong grasp an old silver tray, with coffee, cream, and sugar in old silver pots.
The servant followed her, cross, wrinkled and suspicious, carrying bread and honey and oranges, and a pile of sweet flat cakes. Damaris set down her tray on the marble table.
'We have a few things like this,' she said, touching the old silver. 'We were noble, too, once, very, very long ago, they say; but my grandfather does not believe it. I like to believe it. It may be nonsense, but one likes to fancy that ever, ever so long ago one's forefathers were fighting men, not labourers; it seems to make one ready to fight too. It must make a difference, I think, in oneself whether they were soldiers or slaves. Not, you know,' she added, after a moment's pause, 'that I do not think la petite culture the happiest life in the world; but the labourer is narrow, mean, horribly fond of money, and very rough to his women, and I suppose the poor were still worse in that distant time.'
She poured him out his coffee as she spoke, and filled up the cup with foaming milk, and pressed on him the rolls, the cakes, the honey. The china was the heavy earthenware which rustic people use, and did not suit the old silver of the tray and of the vessels; but Loswa, for once, was not critical; he thought he had never tasted anything more delicious than was this island fare.
Damaris, having served him, ate and drank herself, sitting on a wooden stool beside the balustrade covered with the reddened creeper. She did not want anything, but not to break bread with a guest seemed to her bad manners. She had pulled her sleeves down and put on shoes and stockings. She had thrown aside her woollen cap; her silky, golden curls shone in the sun; her eyes looked at him with honest inquisitiveness and astonishment. Suddenly she said aloud:
'Ah! I remember now! It was you who were with that lady yesterday when she threw me the gold bracelet over the wall.'
Loswa assented, but he would have preferred to forget his friend at that moment, being uneasily conscious of the contempt with which his present position on this terrace would be regarded by her did she ever know of it.
'Did she take me for a beggar?' said Damaris, with anger glistening under her long lashes.
'Oh no, she only wished to please you—to surprise you. You see, she could not tell who you were.'
The girl's cheeks grew a deeper rose.
'That is true,' she said, with her first touch of embarrassment; 'I was rowing, and one cannot row in fine clothes. Perhaps, if she saw me at Mass——'
'If she saw you now!' said he, with a glance of meaning thrown away upon her. 'Remember, she hardly saw you at all; only an old boat, a pile of oranges, a ragged sail——'
'My sail is very shabby,' said Damaris with shame. 'I took the new one to make this awning, and my grandfather was angry and would not let me have another. Who is that lady? She looked very pretty. Is she your wife?'
'She is the Countess Othmar.'
'The Countess Othmar!' she repeated in a little awe. Even she in her solitude had heard that name of power. The narrative was very vague to her; she had never known more than the bare outline of it, but she remembered, when she was a child sitting amongst the daffodils and plucking them on the grass before the house on Bonaventure one evening in the springtime, hearing Catherine, who had been with a load of fruit to the mainland, cry aloud to Raphael:
'Holy
