The Motor Maid | Page 9

presumably to execute my order, that I sank into my chair with a sigh of relief after strain.
Just at that moment I met the eye of the lady of the lift, and when the waiter reappeared with a small cup, on a charger large enough to have upheld the head of John the Baptist, she looked again. In five minutes I had finished the _consommé_, and it became painful to linger. Rising, I made for the door, which seemed a mile away, and I did not lift my head in passing the table where the lady sat behind her roses. I heard a rustling as I went by, however, a crisp rustling like flower-leaves whispering in a breeze, or a woman's silk ruffles stroking each other, which followed me out into the hall.
Then the pleasant voice I had heard near the lift spoke behind me:
"Won't you have your coffee with me in the garden?"
I could hardly believe at first that it was for me the invitation was intended, but turning with a little start, I saw it repeated in a pair of gentle gray eyes set rather wide apart in a delicate, colourless face.
"Oh! thank you!" I hesitated. "I--"
"Do forgive me," went on the lady, "but your face interested me this morning, and as we're all rather curious about strangers--we idle ones here--I took the liberty of asking the manager who you were. He told me--"
"About the Princess?" I asked, when she paused as if slightly embarrassed.
"He told me that you said you had come to Cannes to be her companion. He didn't tell me she was dead, poor woman, but--there are some things one knows by instinct, by intuition, aren't there? And then--I couldn't help seeing, or perhaps only imagining, that you looked sad and worried. You are very young, and are here all alone, and so--I thought perhaps you wouldn't mind my speaking to you?"
"I'm very grateful," I said, "for your interest. And it's so good of you to ask me to have coffee with you." (I was almost sure, too, that she had hurried away in the midst of her luncheon to do this deed of kindness.)
"Perhaps, after all, you'll come with me to my own sitting-room," she suggested. "We can talk more quietly there; and though the garden's quite lovely, it's rather too glaring at this time of day."
We went up in the lift together, and the moment she opened the door of her sitting-room I saw that she had contrived to make it look like herself. She talked only about her books and photographs and flowers until the coffee had come, and we seemed better acquainted. Then she told me that she was Lady Kilmarny--"Irish in every drop in her veins"; and presently set herself to draw me out.
I began by making up my mind not to pour forth all my troubles, lest she should think that I wanted to take advantage of her kindness and sponge upon her for help; but she was irresistible, as only a true Irishwoman can be, and the first thing I knew, I had emptied my heart of its worries.
CHAPTER III
"You will have to go back to the cousins you've been living with in Paris," pronounced Lady Kilmarny. "You're much too young and pretty to be anywhere alone."
"I can't go on living with them unless I promise to marry Monsieur Charretier," I explained. "I'd rather scrub floors than marry Monsieur Charretier."
"You'd never finish one floor. The second would finish you. I thought French girls--well, then, half French girls--usually let their people arrange their marriages."
"Perhaps I'm not usual. I hope Monsieur Charretier isn't."
"Is he such a monster?"
"He is fat, especially in all the places he oughtn't to be fat. And old. But worse than his embonpoint and his nose, he made his money in--you could never guess."
"I see by your face, my poor child: it was Liver Pills."
"Something far more dreadful."
"Are there lower depths?"
"There are--Corn Plasters."
"Oh, my dear, you are quite right! You couldn't marry him."
"Thank you so much! Then, I can't go back to my cousins. They--they take Monsieur Charretier seriously. I think they even take his plasters--gratuitously."
"Is he so very rich?"
"But disgustingly rich. He has an awful, bulbous new chateau in the country, with dozens of incredibly high-powered motor-cars; and in the most expensive part of Paris a huge apartment wriggling from floor to ceiling with Nouveau Art. The girl who marries him will have to be smeared with diamonds, and know the most appalling people. In fact, she'll have to be a kind of walking, pictorial advertisement for the success of Charretier's Corn Plasters."
"He must know some nice people, since he knows relations of yours."
"Thank you for the compliment, which I hope you pay me on circumstantial evidence. But it's deceiving. My mother, I believe, was the