Minna was evidently quite as much at a loss to understand the look as I was.

Madame Fontaine turned to me again, and made an apology.
"Pardon me, Mr.David, there is a little domestic duty that I had forgotten." She crossed the room to a small table, on which writing-materials were placed, wrote a few lines, and handed the paper, without enclosing it, to Minna.

"Give that, my love, to our good friend downstairs--and, while you are in the kitchen, suppose you make the tea.
You will stay and drink tea with us, Mr.David?
It is our only luxury, and we always make it ourselves." My first impulse was to find an excuse for declining the invitation.
There was something in the air of mystery with which Madame Fontaine performed her domestic duties that was not at all to my taste.

But Minna pleaded with me to say Yes.

"Do stay with us a little longer," she said, in her innocently frank way, "we have so few pleasures in this place." I might, perhaps, have even resisted Minna--but her mother literally laid hands on me.