Lorraine, A Romance

He lay at her feet, pulling blades of grass from the bank and idly biting the whitened stems. The voice of the Lisse was in his ears, he breathed the sweet wood perfume and he saw the sunlight wrinkle and crinkle the surface ripples where the water washed through the sedges, and the long grasses quivered and bent with the glittering current.

"Tell you stories?" he asked again.

"Yes--stories that never have really happened--but that should have happened."

"Then listen! There was once--many, many years ago--a maid and a man--"

Good gracious--but that story is as old as life itself! He did not realize it, nor did she. It seemed new to them.

The sun of noon was moving towards the west when they remembered that they were hungry.

"You shall come home and lunch with me; will you? Perhaps papa may be there, too," she said. This hope, always renewed with every dawn, always fading with the night, lived eternal in her breast--this hope, that one day she should have her father to herself.

"Will you come?" she asked, shyly.

"Yes. Do you know it will be our first luncheon together?"

"Oh, but you brought me an ice at the dance that evening; don't you remember?"

"Yes, but that was not a supper--I mean a luncheon together--with a table between us and--you know what I mean."

"I don't," she said, smiling dreamily; so he knew that she did.

They hurried a little on the way to the Château, and he laughed at her appetite, which made her laugh, too, only she pretended not to like it.

At the porch she left him to change her gown, and slipped away up-stairs, while he found old Pierre and was dusted and fussed over until he couldn't stand it another moment. Luckily he heard Lorraine calling her maid on the porch, and he went to her at once.

"Papa says you may lunch here--I spoke to him through the key-hole. It is all ready; will you come?"

A serious-minded maid served them with salad and thin bread-and-butter.

"Tea!" exclaimed Jack.

"Isn't that very American?" asked Lorraine, timidly. "I thought you might like it; I understood that all Americans drank tea."

"They do," he said, gravely; "it is a terrible habit--a national vice--but they do."

"Now you are laughing at me!" she cried. "Marianne, please to remove that tea! No, no, I won't leave it--and you can suffer if you wish. And to think that I--"

They were both laughing so that the maid's face grew more serious, and she removed the teapot as though she were bearing some strange and poisonous creature to a deserved doom.