The End of Her Honeymoon | Page 6

a child was
wont to advise those about her to do.
At last she looked round her for a bell. No, there was nothing of the
sort in the tiny room. But Nancy Dampier had already learned to do
without all sorts of things which she had regarded as absolute
necessities of life when she was Nancy Tremain. In some of the
humbler Italian inns in which she and Jack had been so happy, the
people had never even heard of a bell!
She jumped out of bed, put on her pretty, pale blue dressing-gown--it
was a fancy of Jack's that she should wear a great deal of pale blue and
white--and then she opened the door a little way.
"Madame!" she called out gaily. "Madame Poulain?" and wondered
whether her French would run to the words "hot water"--yes, she
thought it would. "Eau chaude"--that was hot water.
But there came no answering cry, and again, this time rather

impatiently, she called out, "Madame Poulain?"
And then the shuffling sounds of heavy footsteps made Nancy shoot
back from the open door.
"Yuss?" muttered a hoarse voice.
This surely must be the loutish-looking youth who, so Nancy suddenly
remembered, knew a little English.
"I want some hot water," she called out through the door. "And will
you please ask your aunt to come here for a moment?"
"Yuss," he said, in that queer hoarse voice, and shuffled downstairs
again. And there followed, floating up from below, one of those quick,
gabbling interchanges of French words which Nancy, try as she might,
could not understand.
She got into bed again. Perhaps after all it would be better to allow
them to bring up her "little breakfast" in the foreign fashion. She would
still be in plenty of time for Jack. Once in the studio he would be in no
hurry, or so she feared, to come back--especially if on his way out he
had opened her door and seen how soundly she was sleeping.
She waited some time, and then, as no one came, grew what she so
seldom was, impatient and annoyed. What an odd hotel, and what
dilatory, disagreeable ways! But just as she was thinking of getting up
again she heard a hesitating knock.
It was Madame Poulain, and suddenly Nancy--though unobservant as is
youth, and especially happy youth--noticed that mine hostess looked far
less well in the daytime than by candle-light.
Madame Poulain's stout, sallow face was pale, her cheeks puffy; there
were rings round the black eyes which had sparkled so brightly the
night before. But then she too must have had a disturbed night.
In her halting French Mrs. Dampier explained that she would like

coffee and rolls, and then some hot water.
"C'est bien, mademoiselle!"
And Nancy blushed rosy-red. "Mademoiselle?" How odd to hear
herself so addressed! But Madame Poulain did not give her time to say
anything, even if she had wished to do so, for, before Mrs. Dampier
could speak again, the hotel-keeper had shut the door and gone
downstairs.
And then, after a long, long wait, far longer than Nancy had ever been
made to wait in any of the foreign hotels in which she and her husband
had stayed during the last three weeks, Madame Poulain reappeared,
bearing a tray in her large, powerful hands.
She put the tray down on the bed, and she was already making her way
quickly, silently to the door, when Nancy called out urgently, "Madame?
Madame Poulain! Has my husband gone out!"
And then she checked herself, and tried to convey the same question in
her difficult French--"Mon mari?" she said haltingly. "Mon mari?"
But Madame Poulain only shook her head, and hurried out of the room,
leaving the young Englishwoman oddly discomfited and surprised.
It was evidently true what Jack had said--that tiresome Exhibition had
turned everything in Paris, especially the hotels, topsy-turvy. Madame
Poulain was cross and tired, run off her feet, maybe; her manner, too,
quite different now from what it had been the night before.
Nancy Dampier got up and dressed. She put on a pale blue linen gown
which Jack admired, and a blue straw hat trimmed with grey wings
which Jack said made her look like Mercury.
She told herself that there could be no reason why she shouldn't venture
out of her room and go downstairs, where there must surely be some
kind of public sitting-room.

Suddenly remembering the young American's interchange of words
with his sister, she wondered, smiling to herself, if she would ever see
them again. How cross the young man's idle words had made Jack!
Dear, jealous Jack, who hated it so when people stared at her as
foreigners have a trick of staring. It made Nancy happy to know that
people thought her pretty, nay beautiful,