CHAPTER IV

THE FIRST CALL

In spite of much lying-in-wait about the sands and the wide French roads, Ted Urquhart didn't, for the rest of the morning, catch another glimpse of his golden Enigma. Disappointed, but nursing an increasing determination that the afternoon should be less of a blank, he went in to the table d'hôte déjeuner at the Hotel de la Plage. One fish course succeeded another. Then, in the midst of a dessert of tiny black grapes (grown on the white backyard wall of the Hotel), and of little sponge biscuits which it appeared to be the custom of the country to dip into one's glass of very thin red wine and then suck, there appeared before Ted Urquhart the "Madame" of the hotel in her tight black gown and architectural hair, who smilingly informed him that these English demoiselles from the Atelier were all in the hall, desirous of speaking to the English Monsieur.

"Ah!—Good," said Ted Urquhart eagerly.

He strode out into the bare, shady, stone-paved hall, where a knot of girlish figures, in heterogeneous seaside "get-up," were clustered, like bees on a head of teazle, in one corner. A buzzing chorus of talk stopped on a staccato note as the young man appeared in the doorway. For a second he hesitated, glancing from the one black coat with furs to the coloured blouses.

Then one figure, the tallest, dressed in white, separated itself from the others, and came sedately towards him.

"Oh," she began demurely, in a voice very different from the whispering, giggling voices of the other girls, "good-afternoon, Mr.——"

And she—the girl of this morning; "his" girl!—paused. It was to give him an opportunity to slip in the name by which she must thank him.

Ted Urquhart, realising this well enough, didn't give any.

"Not yet; no, not yet!" he was saying to himself. And he forced himself away from the growing temptation to stare.

He noticed how her hair, the wonderful blonde hair that had rippled down far below her waist, and had been so hastily shaken back from her face, was well out of the way now,—plaited into a rope thicker than that which had been let down over the cliff's edge, wound round her head, and hidden away under a very wide-brimmed hat of exquisitely-woven white.

In his quick glance at the girl, Ted Urquhart did not overlook that Panama hat.

For he knew it.

"I come on behalf of these young ladies," the pretty voice was saying, half-deprecatingly, half-mischievously. "We—they all want to thank you so much for your ... well, I don't know quite what to call it——!"

"Heroism, Miss, dear!" prompted the voice of the funereally-clad Jam-Hand. "Like the Surrey," she added.

"Well," went on the girl in charge, "may we say 'heroism'—like the Surrey?"

She met the young man's eyes, and they laughed together.

"Oh, please don't say anything of the kind!" Ted Urquhart implored her, still laughing; his eyes, full of well-leashed admiration, again upon the face under the Panama hat which he had sent, weeks ago, to Eleanor.

The girl had trimmed his gift with a silken scarf, now faded to a tender browny-pink not unlike the colour of those rose-leaves in that letter which had brought him home on an impulse,—but he knew that was the hat.

He knew that he had written in the accompanying letter a description of how these fine hats were made, not of straw, but of the young fronds of spreading palm-leaves, and how they are plaited under water to keep them flexible, and how the little square piece in the crown is the feature of the more elaborate of them. All this he knew: he could almost see his own handwriting in that letter.

But what he did not know was, that Eleanor Urquhart, when she had received that packet at The Court, had said, "Oh, look what a queer sort of garden-hat Ted has sent me from South America! So kind of him, but it's much too large for me—I never wear these immense shady things. Rosamond, do you care to have it?"

"Oh, rather, my dear! Any contributions thankfully received for the pauper's wardrobe!" Rosamond Fayre had laughed; "besides, this is a lovely hat for the grounds, and I shall be able to wear it all the time when we are by the sea."

And that was how it happened that she was wearing it now.

"Please don't dream of thanking me—I'm only so glad I happened to turn up," Ted Urquhart was saying. And then the girl in charge, prompted by another murmur from the group of—"About this afternoon, Miss—you know!—you ask him!" went on sedately:

"Oh, yes! and I am deputed to ask you whether you can spare time to come this afternoon and have tea with us all? We are at the Hostel, that white house with the brilliant green shutters and the studio in the garden. It's on the right of the road to Boulogne, at the other end of the village from here, if you will come——"

If, indeed!

"Thanks most awfully," said Urquhart promptly, turning to the group by the door and smiling again as he met the unabashed gaze of the Principal Boy. "I shall be delighted to come!"

He meant it.

His plan, his excellent plan, was continuing to work out even better than he had dreamed.

First the flying start of this morning's adventure. Now the entrée to Eleanor's hospitality—and under such favourable circumstances! Holiday-time; a jolly little holiday place without any stiffness or formality about it. A foreign village, too; that meant an added excuse for compatriots to be very friendly. Except for a couple of Americans on their honeymoon at his Hotel, there seemed to be only French people and the Hostel party in the village. Naturally the only Englishman would soon find himself attached to the Hostel party—they were genial, sympathetic souls, these Cockney girls. And soon, the "party" also would split up into the immemorial grouping. They—he and she—would grow to be friends—more than friends, as quickly here as on board ship or on a desert-island. Everything was conspiring to help on the courtship that was now about to begin.

He congratulated himself——

Meanwhile, Rosamond Fayre also was thinking: "Well, I suppose this quite pleasant but slightly unconventional young man will now proceed to introduce himself by name?"

Not he.

All he said was, "How soon—I mean when may I come?"

"Tea is at five," he was told. "Good-bye until then—er——"

Again a little pause into which Miss Fayre not unwarrantably imagined that he might have slipped his name.

Ted Urquhart merely echoed courteously, "Until then!"

The bevy of English girls, with a bobbing of small, bright hats, a swing of skirts, and a toss of one set of black furs, moved away from the Hotel in a cloud of white French dust.

Then a clatter of tongues broke out.

"Miss, dear, isn't he handsome?"

"Tall, isn't he?"

"Talk about sun-burnt!"

"Funny kind of belt he'd got on; sort of cowboy-looking, wasn't it? Isn't he like Lewis Waller in—"

"Oh, go on, Mabel Beading! It's always Lewis Waller, with her. Not a bit like an actor, to my mind. More like a soldier!"

"Well, he couldn't look like anything better," said Miss Fayre, whose motto from childhood had been, "Ah, que j'aime les militaires."

"I wonder what he does for a living?"

"I wonder how old he is? Twenty-seven, twenty-eight?"

"I wonder," contributed the Salvation Army Lassie, "if he's married?"

"Not him," declared the Principal Boy definitely.

"Now, Pansy, whatever's the good of saying that, when you don't know?" retorted the Blouse-finisher rather pettishly. "How can you possibly tell, with gentlemen? They aren't like us! They don't have to give the game away with a wedding-ring——"

"And a 'Keep-off-the-grass' expression," added the Jam-Hand, "and a new name! Now, when a young girl's still single, she's——"

"Talking of names," said Pansy, quickly, "what's his? Anybody catch it?"

No; nobody seemed to have caught it.

"Miss, dear," from the Jam-Hand, "didn't he say, when he was talking to you?"

"No," said Rosamond Fayre; meditatively, perhaps. "He did not."

"Funny of him," complained the Typist. "You'd think it was the first thing he'd mention!"

"Well, I wonder what it is? Shouldn't be surprised if it was 'Captain' Something," said the Blouse-finisher, "he'd got his hair cut that way, and that little short military moustache. It'll be in the book in the Hotel, anyway—we could always find out——"

"My dear Mabel! indeed we couldn't!" remonstrated the vice-Head of the Hostel, aghast. "If this—well, if he didn't choose to tell it to us, we couldn't very well go looking it up as if——"

"As if we was after him!" the Jam-Hand came to the rescue. "Miss is quite right. What's in a name?"

The Blouse-finisher persisted that it was queer, not knowing what name you could so much as pass him a cup of tea by.

"And besides, I do want to know it. What am I to call him," asked the Salvation Lassie simply, "in my prayers?"

"Probably he'll send in his card," suggested Miss Fayre, "when he calls this afternoon."

Ted Urquhart, needless to say, did nothing of the kind.

Still full of the excellence of his schemes, he arrived just before five, at the latticed porch of his unsuspecting fiancée's Hostel.

About the base of that porch were planted clumps of ribbon-grass and tuffets of golden-feather and straggles of canary-creeper; and the lattice was gay with the monthly roses that grew from a big plaster vase placed at one side of the entrance. The vase was held up by three laughing Cupids, which had been modelled by the artist who had owned the house. Miss Urquhart, when she transformed it into her Hostel, would have had "those not very appropriate little statuettes" removed. But Rosamond, fearing that the flowers might not bear transplanting, had pleaded that the little, unabashed Loves should stay as they were.

Urquhart's ring at the bell was answered by the old mahogany-faced, snowy-capped Frenchwoman who cooked and cleaned and did the work of three English servants about the place.

But before she could request Monsieur to enter, the slight figure of Annie, the Salvation Lassie, slipped, greatly daring, before her.

Annie also had a scheme respecting names.

"Good-afternoon, Sir. I'm parlour-maid to-day," she informed the tall visitor with a little giggle of nervousness; "so—what name, Sir?"

Mr. Ted Urquhart was not to be caught out thus. What? Held up at the door? Requested to stand and deliver?

He smiled down at the ingenuous little highway-woman.

"You don't remember me?" he said. "I am expected, I think."

Then he let her lead the way into what had been the artist's studio, now transformed by Eleanor into the Girls' Refectory.

The place was long and cool and coloured like a blade of the ribbon-grass outside. Green and white casement-cloth curtained the tall windows, the floor was carpeted with green straw matting, the white distempered walls were bare save for a framed copy of the Hostel Rules and an Arundel print of S. Ursula with her Eleven Thousand Virgins. (Rosamond considered that the small austere face of the S. Ursula was not unlike that of Eleanor herself, and she sometimes amused herself privately by seeking for likenesses in the Eleven Thousand, to the factory-hands or music-hall supers under Miss Urquhart's care.) A large green Brittany crock full of white Bride-lilies with streamers of ribbon-grass stood in the centre of the long table now laid for tea. At the head of it stood that supple girl in white, with the big Panama hat hiding her glorious hair.

"So this is to be our first meal together," thought the visitor. "Well, with luck! it won't be long before I shall contrive to get her to come out to tea with me, somewhere; away from all these rather alarming young women. Ah, Eleanor! Helen—Nell—Yes, that's your name—my name for you. Nell, you little think that I'm the person you'll have to be pouring out tea for every day, presently. Presently you will be sitting at a table for two, perhaps calling me by some name of your own, and——"

"Will you come and sit here," suggested his unconscious hostess, thinking "if he prefers 'you' to any other form of address for the present, so be it!"

And he sat down at her right hand, between her and the Principal Boy, who immediately took most of the burden of entertaining the guest upon her own plump shoulders. And she certainly broke the ice of a situation where a young, well-bred, and good-looking (but curiously nameless) man, the only representative of his sex, was being mutely worshipped as a hero by a bevy of rather self-conscious girls.

"I'll look after him," Pansy chattered, heaping Urquhart's plate, putting the sugar into his cup of tea with her own fingers, all but guiding the cup to his lips. "Oh, doesn't it begin to feel more sort of natural with a man about the house again, instead of the ever-lastin' hen-party? Pass those little cakes along, Mabel; they're sort of tipsyfied. Babies-in-rum they called 'em, but I daresay their bark's worse than their bite. Same as mine. He'll like those.... Not at all! You never find me backward in coming forward when there's boys—er—a gentleman to look after.... I don't," she concluded pointedly, "know what else to call him?"

Ted Urquhart chose to take this question as a mere statement of fact. He helped himself to a baba-au-rhum, smiled at his neighbour, and asked her, pleasantly, if she felt quite recovered after her little fright of this morning.

"'Little fright'?" echoed Pansy, dramatically. "Oh, girls! Oh, Miss, dear! If you'd only known my feelings-not-to-mention-my-sensations, when me and young Annie was hanging there on that cliff like the two Balancinis in that Trapeze Act! 'What had we found wrong with the ground,' eh? Oh! Doesn't it show you what's the fruits of getting up early because it's such a lovely morning? Never again! 'Such a thing as early risin' I—Don't—See!'" she sang. "Getting up? Well! Just as I was thinking the 'bus-conductor would be passing some rude remark about me ankles——"

The Typist blushed; the Blouse-finisher murmured something about not the slightest use taking any notice—and the Pantomime Boy, devouring criss-cross-patterned French cream-cakes, babbled on:

"Just as I was wondering who'd break the news to Mother, up comes Lieutenant Daring the Cliffclimber, that is to say Mister——"

She broke off abruptly. There was a pause; the longest yet. Surely, thought Rosamond Fayre behind the teapot, surely this nameless knight-errant would proclaim his title now? No. The indefatigable Pansy was forced to go on.

"Mister—Who? Myster—ee, I suppose. I believe he's Royalty, travelling incog.—Alphonso! Lobengula! Oh, fancy having me life saved by a Prince! Look well on the bills, won't it? Better than having me jewels pinched! Oh, when he was grabbing on to that rope with one hand and begging me to throw my arms round him, I said, 'Can a duck swim?'"

At this revised version of what had happened on the cliff-ledge Ted Urquhart put back his brown head and laughed infectiously.

Rosamond joined in with the other girls; she laughed, but she was feeling thankful that Eleanor, safe in Paris, did not behold her theatrical protegée in her present mood. Pansy, who had been budding out of the Hostel etiquette all the week, seemed about to burst into full bloom this afternoon.

It was at the second addition of hot water to the teapot that Pansy protested that all she wanted to make her perfectly happy again in this God-forsaken spot, where they seemed to make their tobacco out o' those bits of dry black seaweed that blew about the beach, was a decent cigarette!

Smoking, in the Hostel, was strictly against rules, but ignorant of this regulation of his betrothed's, Ted Urquhart, with some relief that the name-motif appeared to be dying out of the conversation, drew out his case—a thing of finely plaited straw something like that of the Panama hat—and passed it, with a quick glance of inquiry, to his hostess.

"I don't smoke, thanks," said Rosamond. Then, firmly, "Nobody smokes."

A mutinous pout from Pansy. "Miss, dear, couldn't you look the other way? Anyhow——"

With the word she took the cigarette-case and turned it upside down beside her plate. A dozen or so of "Egyptians" rolled out on to the table-cloth.

"Ow! Is that all you keep in it? Sold again!" disappointedly from the Principal Boy. "No cards, by request! All right. Is there a spot more tea in the pot, Miss, dear, for his Royal Highness Prince Mumm?"

Here Urquhart began to realise that the joke of a withheld name was wearing a trifle thin. Why couldn't this rattle of a girl drop it now? It was beginning to make him almost embarrassed before his hostess, it would mean more awkwardness than he intended, when he came, say, in a couple of days or so, to announcing himself by name. He had thought one could slide more easily than that over the situation.... It was the fault of these girls! She—Nell—hadn't shown any curiosity. But all her charges—the little thing who'd opened the door, the girl in glasses, the red-haired, and the coster-y looking ones; they were asking now, with all their eyes, what that impertinent theatrical minx presently put into so many words.

"Haven't you got a name, Mr. Man?"

"Come, Pansy, Pansy!" from the hostess.

"Well, there you are, you see! He's allowed to hear mine," complained the Principal Boy, loudly. "He knows I'm Pansy——"

"Yes; but Miss Pansy What?" fenced young Urquhart. "I haven't been allowed to hear your surname, after all."

"Want to hear it?"' retorted the girl petulantly.

"Not," said the young man quickly, "if you don't want to tell it to me."

"Ah, that's meant for a nasty one, but our family don't take hints. I don't mind telling you," the Principal Boy announced. She finished her cup of tea, glanced quickly at the disposal of the tea-leaves at the bottom, muttered to herself, "A short journey across the sea, a quarrel, the wedding of a friend," and then vouchsafed, defiantly, "My name is Hawkins."

"Oh, hark at her!" burst hoarsely from the Jam-Hand. "Oh, Pansy, you're worse than awful! Where d'you think you'll go to? Hawkins! Oh!" (An explosive giggle.) "Whatever next? Miss Hawkins!"

"It's not her name at all," explained the Blouse-finisher, bridling, and the Typist added,

"Her name is Miss Vansittart."

"Yes," from the Jam-Hand. "And that's only her stage-name!"

The Lassie ventured apologetically, "Her reel name is very pretty, I think; Pansy Price."

"Oh, then, you've got altogether too many names, you know. I couldn't compete with you," said Ted Urquhart, smiling at the handsome rebellious face of the girl beside him, and determined, as Rosamond Fayre realised, to keep this skirmish in the enemy's own country. "Besides," he said, "a lady's name isn't the same as a man's——"

"How d'you mean, Mr.—Er——?"

"I mean that you'll all change yours very shortly, I expect. I shall stick to mine—whatever it is."

"Evident!" said the flushed Pansy. "But—straight now"—she dropped her voice to an insinuating aside—"What is it?"

"Don't tell her!" It was his hostess herself who intervened, turning, half-annoyed, half-smiling, to the guest. "No; don't tell her now. Leave it at that. They've been very rude to tease you about it. Don't tell—anybody your name."

"You see? I am forbidden to tell you!" took up the anonymous knight, with a little nod. "I'm sorry, but it's——"

"Your score. Chalk it up and I'll be round with the money in the morning, Mr. Nought-nought-double-O-Dot," retorted the Principal Boy quite good-naturedly. "Change the subject—seems to be the only change a girl can get out of you!" Then she began to rattle on again, this time about that bouquet of flowers on the table.

"Smell a treat, don't they? Whatever's that stripey stuff you've stuck in with them, Annie?"

"That's ribbon-grass," the Lassie timidly showed off her knowledge from the other side of the table. "At home they used to call it 'Match-Me' and play a game with it—seeing who could get two blades striped just alike——"

"Oh, yes, we know those games!—If it isn't Match-Me it's Shy Widow (I don't think!) or Postman's Knock," from Pansy. "Always end the same way! Always finish in your finding yourself let in for a kiss to the wrong young man!"

And she concluded audaciously to the only young man present, "Is this where we start playing it now?"

"Isn't this where we all go down to the shore?" parried Urquhart, smiling pleasantly at her, "and see if there's any phosphorescence on the waves this fine evening?"

His quickness was rewarded by a quicker glance of half-amused gratitude from the blue eyes of the girl at the head of the now rifled tea-table—and then, with a pushing aside of chairs, and a babble of—"while I get my new ta-ta on"—"Miss, dear, can I come out as I am?"—"is it cowld?"—"no, you can't have my furs! Leave off!" the girls disappeared out of the Refectory, where, in spite of wide-thrown windows, the air seemed close and still vibrating with clatter, to the upper rooms of the Hostel.

Ted Urquhart was left to wait for them in the cool garden outside, where the round-limbed plaster Loves laughed under their burden of roses, to smoke his deferred cigarette and to revise his impressions of the girl who would soon, he found, be settling down very naturally and rapidly to her appropriate place in her fiancé's heart.

"Mischievous, though. Just brimful of mischief," he decided. "Every bit as much so as the other hussy! Only hers—Nell's—isn't allowed to bubble over. It's all tucked away—takes cover under that hat, I suppose. Watch that mouth of hers when the girls she's shepherding say something that she's simply got to appear shocked at——"

He gave a short laugh as he turned up the path again and flicked a bit of ash off on to the broken shell that served for gravel. "Mischief! It was all part of it—her writing to me, long ago, that she hadn't a photograph, didn't bother to have herself taken, as she always came out so badly. Badly? She was hoarding up her looks, deliberately. Meant to spring a mine upon me, when I did come home, with her beauty and—and herself!"

He glanced, as he walked past, at the striped cascade of Match-Me grass beside the porch.

"And her little prunes-and-primsy letters! Jove? The first one of all—'My dear Ted—Father and I both think that it will be the best thing for me to accept your kind offer' (of marriage, forsooth), and then the others, the seedsman's catalogue and the list of fixtures at The Court, and the—she must have been laughing to herself as she wrote that letter! Now, I wonder what on earth sort of a young-man-not-in-a-hurry she thought she was writing to? I wonder what she thinks—whether she thinks anything at all yet, that is, of me?"

Rosamond Fayre was at that moment in her bedroom, changing her house-slippers (always to be worn indoors at the Hostel, Rule 8) for her white canvas beach-shoes, and thinking quite busily about the guest of the afternoon.

And her first impression of him was, frankly, that she liked him very much indeed. Yes. For a number of reasons she considered him (in the bald, but comprehensive summing-up of girlhood) "nice."

To begin with, of course, his looks. His build and make, his alert movements, his graceful height, the breadth of his flat shoulders and the way his rather small head was set upon them—these things pleased Rosamond's eyes, and through them, her sense of what a man should be as well as look. He was active and fit and hard as nails. Now he looked the sort of young man, she thought, to rush up and down the Andes, making no more of the castings upon his shoulder than a porter carting a kit-bag upstairs, like that weird sort of a fiancé of Eleanor's—to whom, by the way, another letter would have to be sent off in a couple of days. Only, keen as he seemed over his engineering and his camp-life, Eleanor's fiancé was obviously a laggard in love. This young man, Rosamond decided, would not be that. She liked the quick grey glance of his impatient eyes—patience in a man being one of the quite numerous virtues which Woman respects and loathes. She liked the "Service crop" of his brown hair and the tan of his face and the short moustache that was scarcely darker than that tan, and that hid nothing of the firm line of his lips. Decidedly good to look at. Such a nice voice, too, thought Rosamond, tying the white strings of her shoe.

The right sort of clothes, too. As old as the hills, but built. He'd changed the blue blazer and waist-belt and white flannel bags of this morning for grey tweed things with an unstiffened white collar fastened by a plain gold safety-pin under a tie of deep-blue knitted silk.

"I wonder if ... anybody ... knitted it?" she broke off.

And she liked the way he wore the clothes, also that leather strap about his wrist, and the very old silk handkerchief that had faded to the brown of an autumn leaf, and—several more of the little details, the omission or achievement of which young women were noticing at the time that young men fondly dreamt that they—the girls—were being profoundly interested in what happened at the seventh hole, or in Ulster; what a man like Lloyd George was actually driving at, or what had been the policy of their particular firm, up to now—

If the youth had but known!

It doesn't matter now, of course, since there is now always the one topic, the War, for maid and man....

This young man, besides being agreeable to look at and to listen to, possessed that Something to which girls who are sisters pay tribute. (In a two-edged remark which sometimes also means that they, personally, find a young man hopelessly uninspiring!)

"The boys would like him."

Rosamond Fayre, remembering the brother dead in his early twenties, thought, "Yes. My dear old boy would have liked him!"

How nice he—the visitor—had been at tea! Some young men might have "taken advantage" in some tiny, imperceptible way of Pansy, who was rather appalling when she let her high spirits run away with her like that. Rosamond was almost as grateful to him for his behaviour this afternoon as for that of this morning.

How ripping and "on the spot" and dependable he'd been this morning!

Rosamond found that she utterly approved of everything she'd noticed, so far, about—his name? What about that name of his? M—m, well!

Well, he'd missed his opportunity of getting it in at once, of course. Afterwards, of course he wasn't going to give away the name at which such a dead set had been made by the girls! Serve them right that he'd faced round and begun to tease them!

Rosamond was glad she'd interrupted, when he was just going to give in. She was glad she'd said "Don't tell anybody your name!"

"Because he'll know," she reflected, as she closed her bedroom door, and ran downstairs to join the group in the porch, "he'll know that when I said 'anybody' I meant 'anybody except me.' He'll have to tell me when we get down to the shore, of course!"

CHAPTER V

THE NEW MOON

Grouped in the hostel porch, the other girls were chaffing, in whispers, the Principal Boy.

"Well, you had all the luck! Not a word or a look for any of us!" they complained. "You were the one, Pansy!"

"Me? Nit," declared Pansy, winking in a fashion for which she had been more than once gently taken to task by Miss Eleanor Urquhart. It was a wink epitomising the experience of five crowded years upon the boards. "Me indeed!"

"Now, just hark at you again!" protested the Jam-Hand, huskily. "You weren't half getting off with your Lieutenant Daring the Cliff-climber, oh, no!"

"Getting off? Scored off, you mean," scoffed Pansy. "Played off, more like!"

"Played off?" queried the Typist, hopefully. "Played off against who?"

"Oh, you get the call-boy to wake you up when it's time for you to come on!" laughed the Principal Boy, under her breath. "D'you mean to say you weren't on to that inside of half-a-minute at the Hotel this afternoon? Who d'you s'pose he's here for? Don't strain yourselves guessing. I'll show you presently."

What she showed them presently (when, taking the slim Annie by one arm and Mabel Beading by the other, she drove the Jam-Hand and the Typist, also arm-in-arm ahead of them, along the stretch of beach below the sandhills) was Miss Rosamond Fayre, with the young man who had been their guest of the afternoon, walking along (but not arm-in-arm) some distance behind.

Perhaps they walked more slowly than they knew. And for perhaps the sixth time since their first breathless encounter of the morning that now seemed such ages away, now in the soft gathering dusk above the sands that had been so dazzlingly sunny, Rosamond found herself thinking, "Now!"

She waited for him to speak.

He spoke. He said, "Don't you think it's a bit too cold for it?"

"Cold," repeated Rosamond, "too cold for what?"

"Why, for the phosphorescence," he explained, turning his eyes to the water's edge where the waves came tumbling in, nearer and nearer to the last tide-mark. Now one ran up in advance, filling with water the hollowed tracks left by the girls ahead; then swirled back, leaving a stretch of smooth brown mirror in which gleamed the reflections of a pearl and apricot sky, a towering sunset cloud, the point of light from a single star. "I don't think we shall see any to-night."

"There was some a night or two ago."

"Ah, yes," said Urquhart. "But I only came over last night."

This, thought Rosamond, was the opening. But he didn't go on. Very well! To return, while he sought for another opening, to the subject of the phosphorescence.

"It looked like summer-lightning on the waves," she told him. "All pale green—wonderful——"

"Ah, but you don't really get enough of it just in the shallow waters here, and in these cool climates. The French coast in August is no place for the real thing," returned the young man. "Right out at sea—in the Tropics at night—that's when it's 'wonderful.' The wake of a ship, where it looks as if she'd turned up a furrow of silver fire as the plough turns up earth. That's where you ought to see it from," he told her, thinking, "and so you shall, and soon! Wait until I carry you off on a honeymoon-cruise round the world, Nell! What would you say to that?"

The girl whom his increasingly venturesome thoughts were addressing as "Nell" said, composedly, "Yes, it must be rather delightful to be able to travel, like that."

"It would be, you darling," responded Mr. Ted Urquhart promptly—but not aloud. So that she still waited for him to say something.

His next remark was more or less an excuse to check their advance for a moment, while the others—their chattering young voices raised from time to time in snatches of musical comedy song—swung on further ahead. Young Urquhart, standing still on the sand, pointed out to the apricot-shading-to-pearl sweep of sky above the tumbling waves and said, "Hullo! The new moon."

"Oh, yes," said Rosamond politely, following his glance at the curve of thin silver over the rim of an indigo cloud. "So it is."

"Doesn't that mean that one ought to curtsey, or bow seven times, or touch gold, or something?" asked Ted Urquhart. And in spite of his care to keep his voice as well under control as his eyes, a shade of difference crept into his tone with the words, "Isn't one supposed to get a new moon wish?"

A shade of difference of another sort was to be detected in the tone of Miss Fayre's "I believe there is some old superstition of the kind. It begins to grow dark quite soon now, doesn't it!"

"Ah, putting me in what you consider my place, Nell?" This was her companion's mental comment. His spoken one was, "Yes, and yet it seems only a few days since we were at the longest day."

To-day had seemed sufficiently long and crowded to Rosamond Fayre. Yet this young man didn't appear to find time in it to remember the most rudimentary beginnings of his manners. After all her "of courses" he was not seizing this opportunity to let her know his name! Here he was strolling by the lacey hem of the waves on the sand and at her side, and the most obvious thing to say remained unspoken. He merely asked if those were the Boulogne harbour-lights that one saw down there to the left?

"Yes." (Did he imagine they were the Lights o' London?)

"And it's not so much further along to Wimereux?"

"No," said Rosamond Fayre.

Here two white-clad figures that had been walking along the sands behind them overtook them, with a cheery "Good-evening!" to Urquhart, who lifted his straw hat. They were the Americans, the honeymoon couple from his hotel, and the little bride gave the swiftest glance of sympathetic interest at the other couple as they passed.

"Why, Lucius, if it isn't that perfectly lovely girl from the Hostel with the nice-looking Englishman from the de la Plage that asked you for matches," she murmured to her own escort. "Now, how thrilling! Don't they just look fine together, with their reflections in that wet sand below them and the new moon just over their heads; isn't it a picture! May their own moon rise soon," concluded the just married girl, happily, "for it's easy to see what's doing there!"

She might not have come to this conclusion—or, again, she might—if she had overheard the dialogue at that moment halting along between this likely-looking couple.

"I believe there are good links at Wimereux," Ted Urquhart said. "Do you play golf?"

"No," said Rosamond Fayre.

"Do you go into Boulogne much?"

"No," said Rosamond.

"I expect you find quite enough to do in this place?"

"Yes," said Rosamond.

"Baggage! I recognise the style of your letters in all this. There's an end coming to this kind of thing though, the very first time I manage to get you to myself—really to myself—for an afternoon," said Urquhart—but not aloud. Aloud he said, "Ripping places for picnics, I should think, all about here."

"Yes, I should think so," agreed Rosamond politely. "I think we ought—as our old lady likes getting our supper over early—I think we ought to be going in now."

It seemed to him that he was allowed only another second of walking beside her, stealing sideway glances at her through the silver-blue gloaming, before she had recalled and collected her chattering flock—before they were again gathered about the entrance to the Hostel, gleaming ghostly-white in the dusk. The light through the Refectory windows pointed a bright, mocking finger across the shrubs, across the shelly path to the provoked and eager and impatient face of that young man outside the gate of twisted iron-work, holding his hat with his walking-stick in his left hand.

Rosamond had only bowed as she said (still as politely) "Good-evening!"

"Good-night," said Ted Urquhart shortly. But whatever else he had chosen to say as he turned away, he could scarcely have made Rosamond Fayre feel very much angrier with him, than she was already feeling at that moment.

Rude young man!

Horribly rude!

What earthly reason could he have for keeping his absurd name (whatever it was) to himself? It made her feel so ridiculous!

For instance, when she told Eleanor—as she was, of course, bound to tell Eleanor—about that escapade of Annie's and Pansy's on the cliff, and how they owed their foolhardy necks to a young Englishman who had—et cetera, what could she reply to Eleanor's natural first question of "Who was he?"

"Oh, he didn't tell us who he was. He came to tea with us afterwards, and he went for a walk on the shore with us, but he didn't give any name——" "Really?" Rosamond could imagine the little line between Eleanor's brows at this. "How very odd!"

Precisely!

Well, she (Rosamond) couldn't help it. It had nothing more to do with her. The young man with the deep cleft in his firm chin had rescued two of the girls; he'd been thanked, he had been asked to tea and had been entertained (by Pansy). Everybody had said "Good-bye" to him quite nicely just now, he'd gone, and there was no reason why Rosamond should think any more about him.

Thinking of him as she presided over the girls' supper of cocoa and charcuterie and bread and butter cut from yard-long French loaves, Rosamond admitted to herself that the young man with those very white teeth had at least one saving grace. He hadn't tried to worm himself into their society under an assumed name! Rosamond had heard of people on holidays who had tried to do this. Really horrid young men, of course. Not the sort of young man that one could feel at home with in every other sort of way, as, to do him justice, one might have done with—but he'd gone. Probably he was off to Wimereux to play golf on those links to-morrow. Why waste another thought on him?

Another thing about that young man with the frank and laughing eyes, thought Rosamond after supper, when the Refectory table had been cleared and the girls had gathered round the piano to sing to the accompaniments that Miss Fayre could play without notes, he had seemed to wish to be friendly and sociable in every other way. He might—if he'd only been sensible—have had quite a jolly time, picnicing and going for excursions with them all; with the girls, with Eleanor when she returned in four days' time, and with herself. He'd only himself to thank that he wasn't going to see anything more of the English contingent while he was here, and that they weren't thinking of inviting him again—or thinking of him anyhow!

The thought with which Rosamond Fayre amused herself as she unwound the golden rope of her hair that night and brushed it into a shining shawl over her nightgown was "supposing the reason was that his name was so hideous or so funny that he didn't like me—us to know it!"

She laughed and mentally ran over all the ugly or ludicrously sounding surnames that she had ever heard.

"Hogg ... Dolittle ... Mr. Prate ... Carrotts ... Gotobed ... Tombs! And there was that new butler at The Court whose name Mr. Urquhart simply had to change to Beeton. His real one was 'Beetles.' Heavens! Fancy marrying a man called Mr. Beetles. Still, it wasn't his fault (the butler's, I mean). It was only his affliction. The type of mind that would make fun of a man because of his surname," concluded Rosamond Fayre, dividing the gold on either side of her face, "is the type that would laugh at a little child in irons. And as I shall never know what his is, why worry about it any more?"

Going back to the subject as she nestled her pretty head down into the pillow with Eleanor's clear marking of "URQUHART. HOSTEL. 1914," it struck Rosamond that it was rather a pity that there was to be no further opportunity for snubbing that nameless young man. Hadn't he rather put on "side" here and there? Hadn't he been just a tiny bit "superior"? About that phosphorescence, for instance? "In the Tropics at night ... that's where it's so wonderful!" As much as telling her, Rosamond Fayre, that nothing she'd ever seen could compare with a man's wider experience. She was glad she'd been so very distant about the New Moon.

That moon had set hours ago; only starlight watched the flat Normandy lands, the leafy garden outside her window. Every evening now the moon would grow, though. How glorious when it was full moon over the sea here! "Silver fire" of phosphorescence in the tropic seas through which the good ship ploughed her way—Pooh!

Thinking of him and——

But here Rosamond Fayre fell off to sleep.

CHAPTER VI

PLAN—AND SUPER-PLAN

Upon a morning that was bright as a diamond, bracing as a sea-dip, blue-and-white as Canterbury bells in the Hotel garden, Mr. Ted Urquhart told himself again that this golden weather was sent by a kind and match-making Providence for the special purpose of speeding his courtship.

To-day should not be wasted, as he had had to waste, through no wish of his own, yesterday and the day before.

For he had seen nothing further of "that perfectly lovely girl from the Hostel" since the evening when she had not even vouchsafed him a handshake for good-night. The day after he had caught just a glimpse of the whole party packed into some French vehicle that passed for a wagonette, leaving a wake of shrieks and chatter and laughter along the white road to Boulogne. In Boulogne itself he hadn't managed to run across them for all his search in patisseries and cinemas and the galéries where you buy—or did buy in the dim ages before the War—scent and soap and silk stockings. The following day all he had seen of the party had been another fleeting glimpse, this time of a vision of hats—a black, feathery cart-wheel, a small petunia-coloured helmet of satin, and a shady Panama—below sandhills. A few yards further on were a white straw "shape" with a gaily flowered band, a Saxe-blue linen sun-hood, and a Salvation bonnet with its lettered ribbon. All those other young women, confound them! She was forever surrounded by them! Yet another hat! a chic, Watteau shepherdess affair, massed with blush roses—close to another, a man's straw hat. A man's? Who the dickens—Ah! Urquhart had felt distinctly relieved when he realised that the two last hats also belonged to people he'd met; to the honeymooning Americans from his Hotel. They'd been picnicing with the Hostel party. Urquhart couldn't very well join them.... It would have looked too much like forcing himself upon those girls! Yes. The young honeymoon couple—strangers to her—were allowed to make themselves at home in that sheltered corner below the sand-hills with her. And he—who'd every right and reason to be at her side, he, her lawful fiancé, so to speak, he couldn't claim a look-in!

A pretty Lenten sort of engagement his had been so far!

But never mind. To-day he meant to take the bull by the horns. He meant to walk straight up to the Hostel, and, no matter who opened the door to him, demand to see Miss Eleanor Urquhart for one moment alone.

He wouldn't go until he'd achieved that moment.

And then—then he'd plunge for it without any more of this infernal beating about the bush! He would hold out his hand and look her straight in the face, that sedately-provoking, mischievously proper, flower of a face of hers. He'd say, "How do you do, Eleanor?" ("Nell" could be kept for later on.) He'd say, "I ought to have told you before. I'm Ted. Now don't pretend you can't imagine who that is" (she'd be certain to make the attempt), "and don't ask 'what Ted?'" (This would be just like her.) "You know perfectly well.—Your Ted."

Then, no doubt, his fiancée-in-spite-of-herself would proceed to make his life a burden by her demure gibes at his behaviour of two days ago. She would—well, never mind. The ice would be broken. There'd be an end of that insolently formal small-talk about the longest day and the weather. He would know where he was—that is, he amended, as he grasped his walking-stick as if it were the hilt of a fencing-foil, she would know who he was; and here he felt, as one turns to a friend, for his tobacco.

Hereupon he realised a diurnal tragedy of Man's life; the ever-recurring catastrophe in two words—"No matches!" He'd long come to the end of the one box of English ones that is allowed to the traveller by an Argus-eyed Customs-house System—to the end, also, of the other six that he'd managed to smuggle over, and he hadn't brought with him out of the Hotel a box of those beastly spluttering foreign things....

This was why he turned into the little low-roofed, double-doored Debit Tabac. And here he found another customer, twirling the revolving stand of picture postcards under the hanging clusters of string-soled shoes, and endeavouring to make the French youth in charge understand by shouts and gestures her resonant Cockney English. She wore her gaudy petunia-pink coat and the small helmet hat that was itself rather like something of a picture postcard. For under the hat there beamed a welcome, the shrewd and powdered face of that pride of pantomime, Pansy.

"Hullo, N. or M.," she said, spinning round on her heel. "Quite a stranger!"

"Hullo!" said Urquhart. "Good-morning."

"Nothing wrong with the morning," admitted Pansy. "Now, young man—you other one, I mean, in French! I'll have this of The Plage, and these two of the landing-stage," waving the cards in his face, "and you might get me out this one—No, no! Not that. Want to get me into trouble with my pal the English Postmaster-General? This other one! Here! This with the forget-me-nots and the heart, and the hand, writing. That's it—Are you coming along?" she added to Urquhart, when the cards, enclosed in a flimsy grey envelope, were handed to her by the young Frenchman with the invariably courteous bow, which she acknowledged by carrying her hand to her satin casque in a military salute. "Coming along with me?"

"Er—yes," said Ted Urquhart. "I think I am walking up a bit of the way with you."

The Principal Boy, swinging along at his side up the cobbled, coffee-scented street, turned suddenly upon him and remarked, "No luck, had you?"

"I beg your pardon?"

"Ow! As man to man, now!" Pansy mocked him with another toss of that hat and that tangerine-tinted hair. "You know what I mean! Didn't meet our Miss Anybody early on the beach this morning, did you?"

Ted Urquhart, surprised and amused, paused a moment to debate within himself whether to treat this remark as a joke or to pretend that he didn't know what this astute young Cockney was driving at. He glanced at her again. No. Not worth while to put up pretences against the snap of those brown eyes. Besides, presently she and the others would know that he was, definitely and officially, engaged to be married to their Miss Anybody, their young Lady Warden.

So he said, as frankly as if quite a long conversation on the subject had already passed between him and the Pantomime Boy, "Meet 'anybody'? No. I didn't."

"Had a good look, I suppose?"

He laughed.

"Had you?"

"Well, as a matter of fact," admitted Ted Urquhart, still laughing, "I had."

"Good!" said the Principal Boy. "I do like anyone who'll come straight to the point. Too many fellows just won't. To keep to the point, I dessay you're fairly bursting yourself to see her again to-day?"

"Well?" said Urquhart, defensive, but smiling.

"Well, you don't want all the others nosin' round and gaping and taking in every remark that's passed——"

"I do not," agreed Ted Urquhart fervently, with another frank glance at the face she turned up. At the back of that broad crimson-and-ivory smile he recognised a real wish to help.... Well! Why not make use of that invaluable asset to courtship, the feminine ally?

"Look here, Miss Pansy," he began. "If you'd really—I'd be jolly grateful—If you'd only——"

"Anything, Mr. Never-mention-it——"

"If you mean my wretched name," he said quickly, "give me another half-day, will you?"

"Why, if that's part of it——"

"It is," said Ted Urquhart truthfully. "It is part of it."

"Right-O, mate. Then you listen to me," his new ally went on quickly as they came to the end of the street where the last cottage was an overturned fishing-boat on a patch of common ground. "This is our Leading Lady's afternoon for writing letters. She'll be in the house from two till five o'clock about. We shan't."

"Where shall you be, then?" asked Ted Urquhart, falling without further ado into this scheme for his welfare. "Which side of the beach?"

"Hardelot," planned the Pantomime Boy. "I'll cart young Annie and those other two off there, and keep 'em out for tea, even if we have to pull through on that black-currant vinegar they bring you with a fancy cake. Must have a bit o' fun sometimes. The coast then being clear, Captain Swift decides to march up to the Hostel to ask for his handsome silver-mounted walking-stick which he was careless enough (ahem!) to leave behind him when he called."

"But I'm afraid I wasn't," objected Ted Urquhart, vexed that he had not remembered this good old rule, this simple plan, for himself. "Afraid I've got it here——"

"Oh, well, if you will have it!" flounced the young woman who'd addressed him as mate. "Oh, some people do take a lot of helping! You'd come off pretty badly at a stage-door, you would. Here! Oh, give it to me!"

And the plump hand of the Principal Boy snatched the walking-stick away from him, whisking it inside the cherry-coloured coat, where she carried it off as a poacher carries a short gun. Ten minutes later that silver-mounted walking-stick of yew-tree wood was reposing among the stack of umbrellas, shrimping-nets, and gay Japanese parasols in the hat-stand of that shaded convent-like hall at the Holiday Hostel; waiting to play the small, but not unimportant part for which it had been cast in the drama of an August afternoon.

Rosamond Fayre, having waved a rather envious farewell to the merry party setting off across the downs to Hardelot, sat down at the window of the little room beside the porch, and turned with a sigh to her correspondence. The morning's post had brought from Miss Urquhart in Paris a sheet of notes of instructions for her clerk. Rosamond, sitting at the bureau, looked them over again.

(1) Write back to the C.O.S. saying I cannot entertain their proposal.

(2) Find out if Nellie Clark, under-bodice hand at Shoddy and Frillings, is taking her holiday the last week in August or the first in September.

(3) Ask Lady M. about clothes for that Jumble Sale in October.

Over the fourth item Rosamond had, as usual, smiled a little.

(4) Write to Mr. T. Urquhart for me. Same address as last time. Tell him what we have been doing in France, but that he'd better write to me as usual at The Court. I shall have to be at The Court off and on, and am returning to take Father those MSS. after I bring Edith Winter to the Hostel, either to-morrow or day after. Shall come back to the Hostel again on the 16th.

(5) Write for that estimate for re-painting and decorating the Canning Town Crêche.

Five letters to write; actually six. For there was another letter of which the envelope was scrawled over with several addresses, the first one being to the Hotel Midas, London. It was in the cash-desk of the Midas that Rosamond had been found so providentially by her present employer. The Midas people had sent the letter on to her old lodgings, who had forwarded it on to The Court, whence Mr. Beeton, the butler, had sent it on to France. And Rosamond had recognised the handwriting inside with a not altogether unaffectionate touch of contempt.... Still? He still remembered her? "He" was the lad who had shared College rooms with her brother, who had begged her to write to him, who had afterwards implored her to marry him. Even if he had been five years older than he was, Rosamond would still as soon have thought of engaging herself to an infant out of one of Eleanor's crêches. He was rather a sweet boy, but he was of the type that remains to the end of Time some woman's unrewarded and devoted dog.

He wrote:

"My dear Miss Fayre,

"This is my second letter to you. One was sent back to me at Oxford. I heard that you were working at the Midas. You ought not to be working. I was horribly upset. I went there and they told me you had left. Will you please tell me where you are and what doing? Mayn't I come and see you? I won't bother you. I swear I won't. Please won't you let me come?

"With kindest regards,
            "Ever yours,
                    "CECIL BRAY."

"Do please say I may come and how soon."

It was a pity, Rosamond thought, that men didn't seem able to strike a happy mean between opening out their whole hearts like a pedlar's wallet on the ground before you, like poor dear Cecil,—and adopting the attitude of the Male Aloof, too lofty or absorbed, or—er—something—to have anything to tell you about themselves, like——

Here the bell rang and Rosamond glanced up from her bureau, out of the window.

"Good gracious, he's come back," thought Rosamond Fayre, swiftly at the sight of the figure standing on the path. "And there's Madame Topp gone to the fair at Portel, and I shall have to go to the door—in this blouse. It's always the way. Whenever one tries to be truly economical and to wear out one's old clothes in private life, somebody not entirely uninteresting is absolutely certain to call!" And bitterly resenting that blouse, she went to the door.

Upon Ted Urquhart the facts that her blouse was a very ancient "has been," with marks of iron-mould upon it, and that her skirt had been a friend of that blouse's youth, were entirely lost. He only realised that the girl framed in the doorway looked daintier in the flesh, than she had done in his dreams of two days; with a deeper rose-colour than he remembered in her soft cheeks; and that his heart seemed to take a leap forward at the sight of her.

Rosamond, for her part, frankly admitted to herself that she was very glad to see him. She hadn't really snubbed him properly the other evening—and he was the sort of uppish young man who really calls for snubbing.

He had called, it seemed, about a walking-stick.

"I am always forgetting something," he told her. "Thank you, so much. Yes. That's the one, with the rather fat knob. Thanks so awfully much!"

"Not at all," said Miss Fayre, looking "Good-bye."

But apparently he had just been struck by an afterthought.

"Oh, look here; I say! I wanted very much to—er—to give some sort of a return little party," he began, "after that tea with you on Tuesday. I—you do have tea out-of-doors sometimes, don't you? Think I caught sight of you with some people from my Hotel yesterday."

A non-committal "Oh, yes?" from Rosamond.

He went on.

"So, if you wouldn't be too awfully bored. That is! Do you think you—and all the others could come and have a picnic tea of sorts with me under the rocks below le Portel this afternoon? I've got a Thermos, and sandwiches and things. And as it's such a ripping day, I—I do hope that you won't refuse me——"

"I am afraid—What a pity!" said Rosamond Fayre sedately. "All the girls are out. They went twenty minutes ago. They are having tea out."

"I say, how unfortunate!" he said. "Have they gone into Boulogne again?"

"Boulogne—without me—is out of bounds," Rosamond told him. "So they've gone to see what sort of 'pictures' there are at Hardelot." She gave him the conventional smile that is the unmistakable paraphrase of "Good-afternoon."

But Ted Urquhart had laid plans that were proof against hints and snubs and cold-shouldering on the part of this young lady. She was going to come out with him. She was going to be taken to the nearest sheltered corner under the rocks, that was out of the way of the everlasting fisher-children with their maddening demand for "un p'tit sou!" Then he was going to break it to her who it was she was going to pour out tea for that afternoon. Also to-morrow afternoon. Likewise on Sunday. Similarly on Monday. And presently for good. Then, perhaps, then she'd have the grace to look a trifle less provocatively self-possessed. He went on conversationally. "Oh, they've gone to the Cinema? Imagine spending an afternoon like this nipped in to red plush chairs in a stuffy tunnel, making one's eyes ache with staring at moving pictures of 'Fool's Head Looping the Loop,' when one might be enjoying oneself."

"They are enjoying themselves," Rosamond corrected him. "People have different ideas of enjoyment."

"I know. Mine, to-day, is out-of-doors; even if the breeze does blow sand into the butter," smiled Urquhart, without troubling any longer to keep the "do-let-us-be-friends-now" tone out of his voice. "And I think we shall have the best of it."

Rosamond Fayre, speaking without meaning to do so, demanded, "Who are 'we'?"

"Why—why, you and I, since we are the only— What?" took up the young man, ingenuously, as if a sudden thought had struck him with dismay. "Do you mean—You'll come and be the picnic, won't you?"

"I?" said Rosamond Fayre. "Oh, I don't think so. No."

Ted Urquhart, blunt as a boy, but in a way at which no one, she realised half-resentfully, could take offence, demanded, "Why not?"

Now there were so many obvious reasons why she should not think of going, that Rosamond Fayre could not, at that moment, remember them. So she looked up at the presumptuous young man who had coolly demanded the afternoon of her. And she protested, "I—I have too much to do before post-time. Fix or six business-letters to write!"

"Half a dozen letters won't take you two hours," he persisted. "Look here! It's only half-past two. I'm certain you can get all those business people, whoever they are, written to by four o'clock. Now, can't you?"

"Well—er——" she hesitated. "Really!"

"And my picnic was to have been at half-past four. Now, look here——"

(Here he nearly slipped out a "Nell.")

"I'll call for you again," he concluded, firmly, "at four o'clock."

Rosamond Fayre shook her bright head.

"That—wouldn't do," she said, but she smiled a little, and with each syllable resolution dropped from her. Involuntarily she glanced over his shoulder at the road to the shore. Never had sunlight and sands seemed so golden, or sea and sky so sapphire-blue, or the air so headily fresh, or she herself in such perfect tune for an outing. If her work were done, she would in the natural order of things go down afterwards to the sea's edge. Why not with this young man who had, after all, rendered an unthinkable service to the employer, in whose place she, Rosamond, now stood? Suddenly she remembered something. That predecessor to Miss Fayre, the secretary who had been dismissed because she had slipped out in the evening to meet the chauffeur in the rose-garden! But what had that to do with it? That was so entirely different. So different that it made up her mind for her. So she added, brightly and conventionally, "Four would be too early. But—if you really don't want to give up the idea of the picnic, come at a quarter past."

"Good!" said Ted Urquhart briskly, and went.

He went back to the Hotel where, in the Hall, he exchanged greetings with the little Dresden shepherdess of an American bride, who was sitting on the wooden settle busily arranging her tea-basket for two; a case of handy, expensive-looking toys, all silver tops and Bond Street leather.