It had happened instantaneously. The electric flash had not been quicker than the glance that had passed from young eyes to young eyes.
Those months ago!...
Mrs. Cartwright had left the French hotel the morning after—had left Les Pins and the man she had refused. Her place at table next to Jack Awdas had been given (as she guessed it would be given) to her successor.
That goddess-built young American had made friends with everybody, easily and at once. The French families had regarded her as if she'd been a visitant from another planet. Olwen Howel-Jones had been subjugated on the spot. But Jack Awdas from the very first déjeuner had scarcely for a moment left her side.
Never before had he seen a girl so frank, yet so apart, so boyish in her unaffected good-fellowship, yet so womanly.
Unchaperoned she had travelled from the States to join her father in London, where he was attached to the Embassy, and where she meant to continue her special War work. But upon landing at Bordeaux she had found a cable from him stating that he would be out town for some days. She'd had no use for an empty house. So she had decided to stay in France and by the sea for those few days.
To young Jack Awdas they were a gift from Destiny!
Some people consider that the truest and most human touch in the world's greatest love drama is that which pitches the young man already infatuated with one woman into the purest passion for another. There is no hiatus of feeling between the gloomy "I am done" of Romeo sighing for Rosaline, and his quick "What lady's that?" when Juliet appears; there is no thought of that first lady afterwards.
Yet who shall measure what Juliet owes to Rosaline?—what rough ways made smooth, what cold young crudities softened and warmed, what kindling of susceptibility, what speeding-up of passion?