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, the project of persuading her to do something he felt she oughtn’t to do flooded him with a tingling pleasure.

He said, “But it’s so pretty!” He could not imagine why he should have said that, and yet he knew when he had said it that he had hit on an argument that would weigh with her.

She sighed as who makes a concession.  “Oh yes, it’s pretty!” And then, to his perplexity, her face fell into complete repose.  She was absorbed in the red beauty in his glass.

It angered him, yet he still felt bland and coaxing.  “You’ll have a glass?”

“No, thank you.”

“You’ll surely have a taste?”

“Ah, no—­”

“Just a drop....”

Their eyes met.  He was peering into her face so that he could be sure she was looking at him, and somehow the grimace seemed to be promising her infinite pleasure.