In the restaurant the waiter uncorked a bottle of champagne and Simon begged the young girl to taste it. She lifted it to her lips, then played with the glass.
Simon watched the slim thumb and finger that encircled the fragile stem of crystal. With unostentatious movements he repeatedly filled his own glass. Occasionally he ventured to lift a glance to Rachel's face.
She wore a skirt of dark silk, and a little flowered scarf over a waist of sheer muslin. The brim of her drooping hat, whenever she leaned forward, cast its shadow over her shoulders and her scarcely-indicated breast. When she straightened up, however, it was as if a cloud lifted and revealed the glow of her cheeks, the line of her lips, the depths of her eyes where some gloomy thought constantly hovered; for, strive as she would, summoning to her aid all her furious pride, she could not conceal the misery and despair that were consuming her heart. From her round wrists her sleeves fell back in ample folds and the pale yellow of her scarf repeated the colour of the champagne.
As the dinner progressed Simon refrained more and more from looking at her. He did not ask himself what was troubling this young girl, he did not wish to know; perhaps he shrank from anything so absolutely youthful as her despair. On the other hand, the costume she wore, in that it was probably of her own fashioning, filled him with a kind of tenderness. Many trifling peculiarities of people, scarcely noticeable movements, awakened in him this feeling. It was a kind of pitifulness in his nature, though he had rarely been moved to the same degree by so slight a detail.
Life takes on to most men, who by middle age have attained any measure of success, the character of a long meal of many courses. But to Simon Hart it seemed like the meal which the traveller takes in a gloomy way station. Now Rachel appealed to him like the unexpected nuts of a dessert, the unlooked for "riddle in ribbons," for he was keen enough to suspect the riddle hidden in this little smooth-skinned girl.
The thoughts engendered in Emily Short, as she quietly observed the pair, were as foreign to her mind as the food was to her palate. In the pauses between the courses she wove a shining romance about Rachel and her companion and finally installed them in a castle similar in architecture to that which decorated the china of the service. Old David, remembering Nora, occupied the moments while the waiter's back was turned, in secreting various tidbits in the pocket of his coat. So slyly did he do this that no one observed his manoeuvres, and he tucked away crackers, olives and finally a portion of ice-cream which was served in a little box.