That day, since the Professor chose (as he often did) to give lunch a miss while he wandered and pottered about in the Forest, he sent his niece into déjeuner alone. Her he never allowed to miss a meal; he held that young people must eat plenty and often.
Bareheaded, with a scarlet knitted coat over her frock, the girl threaded her way through the little round iron-legged tables and past the tubs of flowering cactus outside the piazza of the hotel. She pushed open a window and entered the big light salle. All one wall of it seemed to be windows from ceiling to floor, giving on to the plage and to that stretch of lagoon, and sandhills, pointed by that lighthouse. The other high walls were panelled with mirrors that reflected a dozen times the hanging chandeliers, the rococo gilded curves of carving, the moving heads of the visitors already at the tables.
The reflections of little Olwen's own head and shoulders, black-and-red like a lady-bird, appeared repeated in the picture; she did not see it.
It was another image that she sought....
Her bright glance, searching the thronged and buzzing place, fell on two empty chairs at the long table that ran down the middle of the room.
Ah! "They" weren't in for lunch, then? Nothing to be seen of "Them" until the dîner, perhaps. With a sigh of resignation Olwen Howel-Jones turned to the table for two near the end window where she was accustomed to sit with her Uncle.
But before she sat down, the tall Englishwoman in brown, who was sitting at the little table next to hers, caught the girl's eyes, smiled, nodded, and with a swift leaning forward of a supple body that made her look like the figurehead of a vessel, accosted her in a deep, rather attractive voice.
"I say! Are you alone today? So am I. Have your lunch at my table, won't you?"
"Oh! thank you, Mrs. Cartwright; I'd like to," said the girl, pleased. She took the chair opposite.
Mrs. Cartwright, who had been at the hotel for some days before the Howel-Joneses had arrived, was the widow of an Indian Army officer, the mother of two boys now at school in England, and a journalist under several names.