CHAPTER XLI ONE WORD
The French waitress met Dinah as she entered the hotel.
Madame Thorne had called—there was scarce five minutes since. The visitor insisted ... but insisted on entering. A thousand amiabilities were to be transmitted by the tongue of Louise, and something—the Frenchwoman shrugged her shoulders vaguely—had been left in Madame’s salon for Monsieur.
‘I know all about it,’ cried Dinah, with readiness. ‘Mrs. Thorne and I have just been talking together. It is quite right, Louise.’
She assumed the lightest, most cheerful tone of which she was mistress, feeling, with inward smart, that the French shrug was over-vague, that a glimmer of suspicious knowledge showed on the serving-woman’s face. Then she walked, her step mock-elastic, a poorly counterfeited smile upon her lips, to her sitting-room. Shutting the door, with the automatic care human beings bestow on trivial actions in times when their hearts are fullest, Dinah walked straight to the fireplace. The ‘something’ left for Monsieur was evidently before her. A letter, almost amounting to a packet, stood on the mantelpiece. It was addressed in large decisive handwriting to ‘Mr. G. Arbuthnot, Miller’s Hotel, Guernsey.’
(Cette chère Smeet! Elle sait si bien s’effacer! A pair of iron-gray men’s gloves, lying, modestly, on the farther corner of the shelf did not arrest Dinah Arbuthnot’s sight.)
‘Mr. G. Arbuthnot, Miller’s Hotel, Guernsey.’
Well, reader, if Dinah had possessed only a few grains more of worldly experience it must have been clear to her that this letter never issued from The Bungalow. In the first place, by reason of the handwriting—when did a woman of Linda’s culture affect the Greek e’s, the up and down characters of an undergraduate? In the second, by the ignorance of common English etiquette which the use of the title ‘Mr.’ betrayed.