There was a scraping of wooden chair-legs on the tiled kitchen floor as I came in, and the men rose.

Mrs. Waters introduced “Our friend Monsieur Charrier and his daughter”—and the stout gentleman, who wore pale-hued boots shaped like the blades of oars, bowed until I could see the rolls of fat beneath his collar behind, then shot at me out of eyes like two black currants a glance that made me feel utterly disapproved-of and “found wanting.” The girl gave me a look less frankly measuring, while the whitest teeth in the world flashed in her little face, oval and smoothly olive as the shell of one of those eggs on the table.

She was very lovely....

She held out her hand and gave mine the violent shake that foreigners seem to think so truly English; and then I slipped into the empty place next to Blanche, feeling thankful for the tea which Mrs. Waters handed to me in a large cup decorated with a group of Welsh women in the costume never seen except on china.

I drank it in a kind of thirsty dream; I couldn’t have talked to save anyone’s life just then; but the talk was buzzing on all around.

“—planned to go to-morrow; but shall you be here?”

“—since we find ourselves in such charming neighbourhood, we could prolong our sojourn——”

“Oh, yes, do prolong it! So ripping for Blanche and me to have Odette to go about with! Of course, we never see Billy and Nancy here!”

“Don’t believe her, Odette!” he was laughing quite naturally.

“—can’t call your shore your own, this year! You don’t know what it is to have an engaged couple in the place!”

“No? It is not agreeable?” The pretty French girl turned to smile at him again. “You do not encourage me to come, so!”

“I’m writing a book about it——”

“Theo dear, finish your tea and don’t talk so much!”

“‘The Complete Gooseberry’ it’s called, if you know what that means.”

“Ah! Place where you find the little babies! Yes?”

“No! not place! People! Unengaged ones like us and you and everybody but Them.”

“—Enchanted, madame!”

“—with rules like this: ‘Don’t cough outside doors; they hate it. Far better not go in!’”

“—More hot water, please, Blodwen——”

“—Don’t stalk them with a camera. You never get anything worth printing!”

“—And will I bring a two more fress negg, mam?”

“If one of them’s away, don’t ask who’s got the ink!”

“—No, but do you remember the bathing at Dinard?”

“—Next year, perhaps——”

“—start before lunch——”

“—if the tide’s right——”

“—But Monsieur Charrier, as you were saying——”

“—icy!”

“—as warm as warm!”

“How was it to-day, Nancy?”

“Nancy, I believe you stayed in too long, dear,” murmured Mrs. Waters gently to me as she passed my cup down again.

“Oh, I don’t think so,” I said vaguely, trying to smile at her. She was the only one of the party to whom I felt I could turn in my utter fatigue and bewilderment. For in that party I felt myself as a sort of plain and neglected little nursery-governess. It seemed impossible that anyone should ever have admired me—that Major Montresor had ever paid me compliments—or Sydney wanted to marry me!—or that, for at least a moment, my employer had found me attractive enough to flirt with. I hadn’t looked at him, but I knew he hadn’t glanced once at me. His attention was entirely divided between Monsieur Charrier, to whom he listened with a deference new to me, and that pretty French fashion-plate in white and cream and tango-colour, who laughed whenever her host said anything at all.

Yes! She was very lovely. She made me feel dowdy and drab and gauche beyond words. Even at my best I should have felt that she outshone me; even if I did possess longer eyelashes and a flush of pink and a dimple, what were these compared with the finished chic of the way she wore hair and clothes—to her scintillating vivacity? No wonder the man beside her was so obviously lost in admiration of her!

Men adore a girl who’s “bright,” who amuses them while she saves them the trouble of thinking what to say. I believe that somewhere at the back of every man’s mind there’s a fancy portrait of himself, in a sultan’s turban, applauding condescendingly while some fair dancing-girl postures and performs for his pleasure.

Men! Even the ones who have seemed “whitest,” as Jack calls it, turn out to be cads in the end. Trying to flirt with the girl to whom you’re nominally engaged, and whom you’ll never marry, is the sort of “joke” that appeals to a masculine sense of humour. Yes, even when the possessor happens to be really attracted by quite another girl. For it didn’t take me many seconds of silent looking-on to see what game was being played between my employer and that girl.

“Odette, are these your gloves?”

He picked them up from the floor when at last we all rose.

“Your gloves, Billy,” retorted Mademoiselle Charrier gaily. “Still a pair from the beautiful great box you bought me. You remember, yes?”

“Ah, the box you won from me at that flying-meeting. Of course I remember.”

And I too remembered hearing of those gloves and this bet, ages ago—the afternoon after I had been out to lunch for the first time with my official fiancÉ.

So this was the young French girl he’d told me about! And as I watched them standing chatting together, a little apart from the group round the motor outside, I suddenly gave a quick guess at something else he might have had to tell me about her if he’d chosen.

This very girl had something to do with his official engagement to me! Somehow or other, she was his “reason” for appearing to have a fiancÉe at all—a fiancÉe upon whom he’d been so particular to impress that “this affair would never end in marriage!” Possibly my employer and that girl were already secretly—but really, not nominally—betrothed to one another?

It looked like it. It looked uncommonly like it.

At something he said she blushed quite rosily. Oh, and they mustn’t think I didn’t notice her shake of the head and her quick little silencing frown at my official fiancÉ when her father, in a tea-coloured alpaca dust-coat, at last left off fussing over his engines and asked them if they—calling them “mes enfans”—were ready to start?

“Oh—but are you going too, then, Billy?” his mother put in quickly. Monsieur Charrier answered with a flow of French about “affaires,” and documents which he had left at his hotel in Holyhead, which it would be so much, so much better if Mr. Waters would spare but a little half-hour to investigate.

“Very good of you to give me the opportunity, sir,” said Mr. Waters. “I can get a train back, mother.”

“Ah, but no, but no! The auto will be again at your service as soon as we have dined at that dog of an hotel,” declared the stout Frenchman. “I will bring your son home quite safely, madame, to you and”—with a particularly hollow show of politeness—“to mademoiselle!”

Here his daughter murmured something about the four seats in the auto, plenty of space for mademoiselle his fiancÉe if she would deign to accompany——

I expect Mademoiselle Charrier knew well enough how safe it was to issue that invitation! So did my employer, when he struck in with “Ah, that’s very nice of you,” then turned and addressed me directly for the first time since we had walked up from the beach together.

“Yes! That would be a good idea, wouldn’t it? You’ll come along too, won’t you, Nancy? We could get a trap back.”

I excused myself as naturally as I could manage it, with something about being rather tired. It was true enough.

As that cherry-coloured car panted, jerked, then whizzed off down the stone-wall-bordered Holyhead road, with its trio of passengers, I felt almost as if it had driven straight over me.

And I felt as if I shouldn’t have cared very much one way or the other if it had!