That party, three floors and five or six rooms away, did still dominate the whole hotel! She was glad to lie back in Mrs. Cartwright's basket-chair and to draw a long breath. She had nothing to do that afternoon, she thanked goodness....
But Mrs. Cartwright, as soon as she came in, drew a chair up to her writing-table and began to make notes, chuckling from time to time.
"Tell me when the people begin to go," she begged Olwen. "I had to make an errand about the tea, and take a peep in just now, I couldn't miss it.... My dear! The heat! And the din down there! Poor Miss Walsh! How Madame crammed them all in I don't know.... And Monsieur Leroux with his black domino beard and his pouchy eyes, and all those women exactly the same height whether they sit down or stand up...."
She was scribbling sketches of them all to send to her boys....
The noise downstairs rose to sounds of confused singing—Le Chanson des Baisers, then fell at last.
"I think they're all going away now," said Olwen from the balconied window, and Mrs. Cartwright ran to join her and to watch the homeward-faring procession filing by.
First the notary, his white bowler hat a little dinted, appeared round the corner of the hotel. He was arm in arm with Monsieur Popinot, who still carried his wife's pink parasol, and who seemed to have an idea of putting it up over the pair of them as they went by the windows, but was restrained by a gesture, suppressed but fierce, from the notary. His purple-clad wife hustled the children ahead of her; the party in mourning were giggling joyously together, then assumed a gravity.
With the same effect of pompously pulling themselves together with which they had passed the front of the hotel, they all repassed it now.
Even as they turned their backs upon it, the strain was seen to relax again. Up went the pink parasol in the distance.
"Ah, there; there goes Gustave's comrade the artilleriste," commented Mrs. Cartwright. "First at the fight—and last at the feast; yes, he's the last."