CHAPTER X
DIVAGATIONS OF THE CHARM
"There's a girl wanted there, there's a girl wanted there,
And he don't care if she's dark or fair,
There's a nice little home that she's wanted to share."
Song of the Past.
The scene with which the last chapter closed would have been further undeniable proof to Olwen of the too-potent success of her talisman, had she known of it. But how about the working of the Charm, as it had been mapped out by herself?
As it was, guessing nothing as yet of how it had drawn to her friend, Mrs. Cartwright, the adoration of quite the wrong man, the girl was already in a mood of dissatisfaction. Chiefly, perhaps, because half the day was over, without a word or look for her from Captain Ross. It is true that the young Staff officer had announced the evening before that he guessed he was going to take the following day out in the open. But if her Charm had been strong as she had hoped it, Captain Ross would scarcely have wished to leave the hotel for an entire day while she (Olwen) was in it? Yet, how magic had been its effect in the case of Miss Walsh and her sergeant! They (the fiancés) were now inseparable, rather to the scandal of the French contingent, new to the code of the English betrothed. Olwen scarcely had a word with her friend, except for good night! Well, the unchaperoned Miss Walsh was entirely happy. That was one ray of brightness in the gloom of little Olwen's mood, for even she was now coming round to Mrs. Cartwright's expressed view that it was better to be happy with a quite unsuitable partner than to be bored with one who is apparently "cut out" for one. So much for what the Charm had done for Agatha Walsh.
But what about Olwen herself? What about Mrs. Cartwright? What about little Mr. Brown?... To the girl, in her present impatient frame of mind, there seemed to be absolutely "nothing doing," as Captain Ross would have said.
That very afternoon, when she and her Uncle were closeted together in that bare, shining study-room of his, she had tried to draw a discussion of Mrs. Cartwright into the rewriting of the Professor's article on old Welsh flower-names, but the old man was not to be diverted from his own subject.
"Never mind Mrs. Cartwright's new dress now, Olwen fach," he'd said, indulgently, but firmly. "Clothes, clothes, and stuffs——! Get on with this, now——" And he had laid down close to her typewriter a further page of notes, in his all but indecipherably small handwriting: