Settled in her own chair, she raised her cup, eyes smiling at him to the last over its very rim, until she must drop them to make sure of fitting it exactly to her still incredibly, always incredibly, tiny mouth.
"This is really excellent coffee," she remarked, after a sip.
"It's some of our own. One of the better grades, from the warehouse. I have a small sackful sent home every now and again for Aunt Sarah's use."
"I don't know what I should do without it. It is so invigorating, of a chilly morning. There is nothing I am quite so fond of."
"You mean since you have begun to sample Aunt Sarah's?"
"No, always. All my life I--"
She stopped, seeing him look at her with a sort of sudden, arrested attention. It was like a stone cast into the bubbling conversation, and sinking heavily to the bottom, stilling it.
There was some sort of contagion passed between them. Impossible to give it a name. She seemed to take it from him, seeing it appear on his face, and her own became strained and watthful. It was unease, a sudden chilling of assurance. It was the unpleasant sensation, or feeling of loss, that a worthless iron washer might convey, suddenly detected in a palmful of golden disks.
"But--" he said at last, and didn't go on.
"Yes?" She said with an effort. "Were you going to say something?" And the turn of one hand appeared over the edge of the table before her, almost as if in a bracing motion.
"No, I--" Then he gave himself the lie, went on to say it anyway. "But in your letter once you said the opposite. Telling me how you went down to a cup of tea in the morning. Nothing but tea would do. You could not abide coffee. 'Heavy, inky drink.' I can still remember your very words."
She lifted her cup again, took a sip. She was unable therefore to speak again until she had removed it out of the way.
"True," she said, speaking rather fast to make up for the restriction, once it had been removed. "But that was because of my sister."
"But your preferences are your own, how could your sister affect them ?"
"I was in her house," she explained. "She was the one liked tea, I coffee. But out of consideration for her, in order not to be the means of causing her to drink something she did not like, I pretended I liked it too. I put it in my letter because I sometimes showed her my letters to you before I sent them, and I did not want her to discover my little deception."
"Oh," he grinned, almost with a breath of relief.
She began to laugh. She laughed almost too loudly for the small cause she had. As if in release of stress.
"I wish you could have seen your face just then," she told him. "I didn't know what ailed you for a moment."
She went on laughing.
He laughed with her.
They laughed together, in a burst of fatuous bridal merriment.
Aunt Sarah, coming into the room, joined their laughter, knowing as little as either of them what it was about.
9
Her complexion was a source of considerable wonderment to him. It seemed capable of the most rapid and unpredictable changes, al-. most within the twinkling of an eye. These flushes and pallors, if such they were, did not actually occur before his eyes, but within such short spans of time that, for all practical purposes, it amounted to the same thing.
They were not blushes in the ordinary sense, for they did not diminish again within a few moments of their onset, as those would have; once the change had occurred, once her coloring had heightened, it remained that way for hours after, with no immediate counteralteration ensuing.
It was most noticeable in the mornings. On first opening the shutters and turning to behold her, her coloring would be almost camelia-like. And yet, but a few moments later, as she followed in his wake down the stairs and rejoined him at the table, there would be the fresh hue of primroses, of pink carnations, in her cheeks, to set off the blue of her eyes all the more, the gold of her hair, to make her a vision of such loveliness that to look at her was almost past endurance.
In a theatre one night (they were seated in a box) the same transfiguration occurred, between two of the acts of the play, but on this occasion he ascribed it to illness, though if it were, she would not admit it to him. They had arrived late and had therefore entered in the darkness, or at least dimness relieved only by the stage lights. When the gas jets flared high, however, between the acts, she discovered (and seemed quite concerned by it, why lie could not make out) that their loge was lined with a tufted damask of a particularly virulent apple-green shade. This, in conjunction with the blazing gas beating full upon her face, gave her a bilious, verdant look.
Many eyes (as always whenever she appeared anywhere with him) were turned upward upon her from the audience, both men and women alike, and more than one pair of opera glasses were centered upon her, as custom allowed them to be.
She shifted about impatiently in her chair for a moment or two, then suddenly rose and, touching him briefly on the wrist, excused herself. "Are you ill ?" he asked, rising in the attempt to follow her, but she had already gone.
She returned before the lights had had time to be lowered again, and she was like a different person. The macabre tinge was gone from her countenance; her cheeks now burned with an apricot glow that fought through and mastered the combined efforts of the gaslights and the box-lining and made her beauty emerge triumphant.
The number of pairs of opera glasses tilted her way immediately doubled. Some unaccompanied men even half rose from their seats. A sibilant freshet of admiring comment could be sensed, rather than heard, running through the audience.
"What was it?" he asked anxiously. "Were you unwell? Something at supper, perhaps--?"
"I never felt better in my life!" she said confidently. She sat now, secure, at ease, and just before the lights went down again for the following act, turned to him with a smile, brushed a little nonexistent speck from his shoulder, as if proudly to show the whole world with whom she was, to whom she belonged.
One morning, however, his concern got the better of him. He rose from the table they were seated at, breakfasting, went over to her, and tested her forehead with the back of his hand.
"What do you do that for ?" she asked, with unmarred composure, but casting her eyes upward to take in his overhanging hand.
"I wanted to see if you had a temperature."
The feel of her skin, however, was perfectly cool and normal. He returned to his chair.
"I am a little anxious about you, Julia. I'm wondering if I should not have a doctor examine you, just to ease my mind. I have heard of certain--" he hesitated, in order not to alarm her unduly, "--certain ailments of the lung that have no other indication, at an early stage, than these--er--intermittent flushes and high colorings that mount to the cheeks--"
He thought he saw her lips quiver treacherously, but they formed nothing but a small smile of reassurance.
"Oh no, I am in perfectly good health."
"You are as white as a ghost, at times. Then at others- A few moments ago, in our room, you were unduly pale. And now your cheeks are like apples."
She turned her fork over, then turned it back again the way it had been.
"It is the cold water, perhaps," she said. "I apply it to my face with strong pats, and that brings out the color. So you need not worry any longer, there's really nothing to be alarmed at."
"Oh," he exclaimed, vastly relieved. "Is that all that causes it? Who would have believed--!"
He turned his head suddenly. Aunt Sarah was standing there motionless, a plate she had forgotten to deliver held in her hand. Her eyes stared at Julia's face with a narrow-lidded scrutiny.
He thought, understandingly, that she too must feel concern for the state of her young mistress' health, just as he had, to fix upon her such a speculative stare of secretive appraisal.