"They're all right. Now you want to put on lots of butter," she said.
"Here, that's not near enough," she reproved him. She reached over, took
his biscuit, buttered it as she thought it should be buttered, and
returned it to his plate; then, while eating, watched him eat with eyes
that expressed her simple love of feeding up any one, man or animal, so
lean as he.

There had been shining in Aurora's eyes all this evening, when they
rested on him, a look of great kindness, the consequence of knowing how
badly life had treated him, and desiring that compensation should be
made. He could not fail to feel that warm ray playing over his bleak
surface. He could not but think what nice eyes Mrs. Hawthorne had.

When he asked her if she knew how to make many other such delicious
things it became her turn to talk. Estelle here joined in, and they
exalted the fare of home, affecting the fiction of having found nothing
but frogs' legs, cocks' combs, and snails to feed upon since they struck
Italy. Blueberry-pie--did Mr. Fane remember it? Fried oysters! Buckwheat
cakes!

He said he remembered, but did not confess to any great emotion.

"You wait till Thursday," said Aurora. "It's Thanksgiving. We're going
to have chicken-pie, roast turkey, mince-pie, squash-pie, everything but
cranberry sauce. We can't get the cranberries. Will you come?"

In haste and confusion he said, alas! it would be impossible, wholly
impossible, intimating that he was a man of a thousand engagements and
occupations.

But after an interval, and talk of other things, he inquired, with an
effect of enormous discretion, whether he might without too great
impertinence ask who was coming to eat that wonderful Thanksgiving
dinner which her own hands, he must suppose, would largely have to
prepare.

"Just the Fosses. All the Fosses."

"Ah, Mr. Foss will feel agreeably like the great Turk."

"You mean he'll be the only man? I guess he can stand it. We thought of
asking Charlie Hunt, too, but he's English and would seem an outsider at
this particular gathering. Wish you'd come. You're such a friend of
theirs. Come on, come!"

"Mrs. Hawthorne, you are so very unusually kind. If you would leave it
open, and then when the day arrives, if I should find I could do so
without--without--"

"Oh, yes. Come if you can. And be sure, now, you come!"

They were still sitting at the table--dinner had been retarded by the
circumstantial round of the house--when music