Nana was vexed.  The great silly thing to go sloping off from Mamma’s with an empty stomach, just to chuck himself into a hole full of water!  But she was as hungry as a hunter too.  They certainly must feed!  Only they would have to eat what they could get.  Whereupon a round table was rolled up in front of the fire, and the queerest of dinners was improvised thereon.  Zoe ran down to the gardener’s, he having cooked a mess of cabbage soup in case Madame should not dine at Orleans before her arrival.  Madame, indeed, had forgotten to tell him what he was to get ready in the letter she had sent him.  Fortunately the cellar was well furnished.  Accordingly they had cabbage soup, followed by a piece of bacon.  Then Nana rummaged in her handbag and found quite a heap of provisions which she had taken the precaution of stuffing into it.  There was a Strasbourg pate, for instance, and a bag of sweet-meats and some oranges.  So they both ate away like ogres and, while they satisfied their healthy young appetites, treated one another with easy good fellowship.  Nana kept calling Georges “dear old girl,” a form of address which struck her as at once tender and familiar.  At dessert, in order not to give Zoe any more trouble, they used the same spoon turn and turn about while demolishing a pot of preserves they had discovered at the top of a cupboard.

“Oh, you dear old girl!” said Nana, pushing back the round table.  “I haven’t made such a good dinner these ten years past!”

Yet it was growing late, and she wanted to send her boy off for fear he should be suspected of all sorts of things.  But he kept declaring that he had plenty of time to spare.  For the matter of that, his clothes were not drying well, and Zoe averred that it would take an hour longer at least, and as she was dropping with sleep after the fatigues of the journey, they sent her off to bed.  After which they were alone in the silent house.

It was a very charming evening.  The fire was dying out amid glowing embers, and in the great blue room, where Zoe had made up the bed before going upstairs, the air felt a little oppressive.  Nana, overcome by the heavy warmth, got up to open the window for a few minutes, and as she did so she uttered a little cry.

“Great heavens, how beautiful it is!  Look, dear old girl!”

Georges had come up, and as though the window bar had not been sufficiently wide, he put his arm round Nana’s waist and rested his head against her shoulder.  The weather had undergone a brisk change:  the skies were clearing, and a full moon lit up the country with its golden disk of light.  A sovereign quiet reigned over the valley.  It seemed wider and larger as it opened on the immense distances of the plain, where the trees loomed like little shadowy islands amid a shining and waveless lake.  And Nana grew tenderhearted, felt herself a child again.  Most surely she had dreamed of nights like this at an epoch which she could not recall.  Since leaving