The Motor Maid | Page 9

exactly in the middle of the room, with no view save of
faces and backs of heads.
One of the faces was that of the lady who had gone up with me in the

lift; and now and then, from across the distance that separated us, I saw
her glance at me. She sat alone at a table that had beautiful roses on it,
and she read a book as she ate.
One ordered here _à la carte_: there was no _déjeuner à prix fixe_; and
it took courage to tell a waiter who looked like a weary young duke that
I would have _consommé_ and bread, with nothing, no, nothing to
follow.
Oh! the look he gave me, as if I had annexed the table under false
pretences!
Suddenly the chorus of an American song ran with mocking echoes
through my brain. I had heard Pamela sing it at the Convent:
The waiter roared it through the hall: "We don't give bread with one
fish-ball! We-don't-_give_-bread with one fish-_ba-a-ll_!"
I half expected some such crushing protest, and it was only when the
weary duke had turned his back, 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