Or, whether she said “I hope you’ll like ’em,” I am not certain--for a sudden sense of intimacy flashed between us and disconcerted me. Perhaps it was the tone and gesture rather than the actual words. A sweetness as of some deep, remembered joy rose in me.
I started. There had been disclosure, a kind of revelation. A door had opened. They were familiar to me--those small “unleavened cakes.” Something of happiness that had seemed lost slipped back of its own accord into my heart. My head swam a second. Some part of me was drawn backwards. For, as I took the offered cake, there stole to my nostrils a faint perfume that made me tremble. Elusive, ghostly sensations dropped their hair-like tracery on the brain, then vanished utterly. It was all dim, yet haunting as a dream. The perfume faded instantly.
“Thank you,” I murmured. “You make them deliciously ...” aware at the same moment I had been about to say another thing in place of the empty words, but had deliberately kept it back.
The bewilderment came and went. Mrs. LeVallon dropped her eyes from mine, although the question in their penetrating gaze still lingered. I realised this new sense of intimacy that seemed uncannily perfect, it was so natural. No suggestion lay in it of anything that should not be, but rather the close-knit comfortable atmosphere of two minds that were familiar and at home in silence. It deepened with every minute. It seemed the deep companionship that many, many years had forged.
Yet the moment of wonder had mysteriously come and gone. Even the aroma of the little steaming cake was lost as well--I could not recapture the faint odour. And it was my surface consciousness, surely, that asked then about the recipe, and joined in the soft, familiar laughter with which she answered that she “reely couldn’t say quite,” because “it seemed to have come of its own accord while I was doing nothing in particular with odds and ends about the cooking-stove.”
“A very simple way,” I suggested, trying to keep my thoughts upon the present, “a very easy way of finding new recipes,” whereupon, her manner graver somewhat, she replied: “But, of course, I could make them better if I stopped to think a bit first ... and had the proper things. It’s jest my laziness. I know how--only”--she looked peeringly at me again as with an air of searching for something I might supply--“I’ve sort of mislaid something--forgot it, rather ... and I can’t, for the life of me, remember where I learned it first.”