"No, you don't," he triumphed. "Now say 'yes,' and then perhaps you may get up, darling; darling——!"
At the delight of hearing it from his lips she shut her eyes even as a sweetheart of little Olwen's age might have done. It was her moment of ecstasy, poignant and ageless and pure....
A moment only.
There broke into it footsteps and a girl's voice, a charming voice, but of an inflection most un-English.
"Why, yes! Wasn't I expected? I wrote the hotel anyway.... J'ai écrit.... Miss Golden van Huysen.... Oh, pardon me——"
Mrs. Cartwright's eyes had opened upon something that seemed like a sunburst breaking in upon the dim and formal, Frenchily-furnished lounge. A vision it was of gold and colour. Radiance seemed to emanate from it—from her.... For it was just a girl, a blonde and generously-built girl, whose coat, thrown open, showed a crisp light uniform with the Red Cross. Her head, proudly carried, was backed by the hanging lamp that made a glory around it, and Miss Golden van Huysen, self-introduced, might have stood for a symbolical figure of Young America breaking into the War, descending upon the Old Continent with help in her hands.
She moved, and the light fell directly on her face. It had the contours and the bloom of a peach, and under her slouch hat her eyes, large and wonderfully wide apart, shone out with candour and young eagerness for life. Yes, youth, youth! That was the keynote of her. That, and the sweetness of honey, coloured like her hair; the kindliness of milk, white as her skin.
Mrs. Cartwright, with doom at her heart, looked at this young girl. So did Jack Awdas, who had sprung to his feet and off the wicker chair-arm. The girl frankly returned the glances of the lady sitting back there, and of the boyish English officer who was (as she ingenuously put it to herself) "the loveliest looking young man she'd ever seen."
Jack Awdas did not know that he was staring almost rudely.... Mrs. Cartwright knew. She also knew what a kiss had been interrupted by that look at another.
And when the bustle of this arrival and of Madame and the chasseur and the "grips" and the Franco-American explanations had died away to the first landing, it was Mrs Cartwright, standing, who spoke.