ndpapering each
other's temperaments with a few words. "Be thankful she thought to boil
a potato. No greens. And I had to ask for a bit bread. And the reason's
not far to seek. She's had a drop again. It staggers me how your father,
who's so particular with the rest of us, stands such a body in the
place."

He did not answer her. The moment had become one of pure enjoyment.
There was no sense of strain in his appreciation of her while she was
putting down the tray, spreading out the plates, and doing things that
were all directed to giving him comfort. Their relationship felt
absolutely right.

"Will you have one of the bottles of Burgundy your father keeps for when
he lunches in?" she said.

"I was just thinking I would," he answered, and went into his father's
room. As he stooped before the cupboard her voice reached him,
fortuitously uplifted in "The Flowers of the Forest are a' wede away."
Now how did she look when she sang? It improved some people. He knelt
for a minute in front of the dusty cupboard, frowning fiercely at the
bottles because it struck him that she would stop singing when he went
back, and he could think of no way of asking her to go on that would not
be, as he put it, _infra dig_. And sure enough, when he entered the room
a shy silence fell on her, which she broke by saying, "If you've not got
the corkscrew there's one on my pocket-knife." He used it, telling
himself that it spared turning on the gas again in the other room, and
she stood behind him murmuring, "Yon's not a bad knife. Four blades and
a thing that takes stones out of a horse's hoof...."

He sat down to his meal, and she remained by the fireplace until he
said, "Pray sit down, Miss Melville, I wish I could ask you to join
me...."

She obeyed because she was afraid she might be fretting him by standing
there, and took the seat on the other side of the table. The gas-jet was
behind her, so to him there was a gold halo about her head and her face
was a dusky oval in which her eyes and the three-cornered patch of her
mouth were points of ardour. She had an animal's faculty for keeping
quite still. He felt a pricking appetite to force the moment on to
something he could not quite previsage, and found himself saying, "Will
you have some Burgundy?"

She was shocked. "Oh no!"

He perceived that here was a matter of principle. But he felt, although
principles were among his conventions, not the least impulse to defer to
it. Instead,