Dinner was more than half through, and still he had found no opportunity of utilising the pleasant unconventionality afforded by the table d’hôte system. If only they had been next to him; but being opposite tended to hinder matters. He could not even volunteer the salt or the mustard, and under cover of that flimsy advance work up a conversation, for both those condiments—and everything needful—were as lavishly supplied on the other side of the table as on his own. What the deuce was he to say? For once in his life, easy-going Philip Orlebar felt his normal stock of assurance fail him.
“Alma, child,” the elder lady was saying in a low tone, but audible across the table, “hadn’t you better change places with your uncle and come next to me? I don’t think he ought to sit with his back to the window.”
“Not her parents, by Jove!” thought Phil. “‘Alma.’ That’s a name I never heard before.”
“’Tisn’t that,” grumbled the veteran, before his niece could reply. “There’s no draught—none at all. But what the deuce do they mean by sticking us up in this corner with our backs to the view? I don’t want to look at a lot of other animals feeding. I want to get the benefit of the mountains opposite, and the sunsets and all that.”
“But, uncle,” struck in the girl—and Phil noted that she had a sweet voice, beautifully modulated and clear—“we can look at the mountains opposite all day long, but this grand opportunity of studying a considerable collection of our fellow-creatures all off their guard is only vouchsafed at table d’hôte time. And I was just congratulating myself on having the whole population in front of me.”
“Pooh-pooh, child! When you get to my age you’ll have had quite enough of studying your fellow-creatures—more than enough, I’ll lay a guinea. And confound it, we come to this country to study Nature,” added the old man, relapsing into his original growl.
Now this conversation, though carried on in a low tone, was distinctly audible across the table—a fact of which the parties to it should have been aware but for that inconceivable fatuity peculiar to our fellow-countrymen when abroad, a conviction that everybody but themselves is either deaf or afflicted with an opacity of understanding which could hardly exist outside an asylum for imbeciles. So they were not a little surprised and slightly perturbed when Fordham, looking up, said quietly:
“If you will allow me, sir, I shall be happy to exchange seats. It is perfectly immaterial to me which way I face.”
The trio looked astonished, but the relief on one countenance could hardly dissemble itself.
“Er—you are very kind,” stuttered the veteran. “But—er—really—I hardly like—er—unfair advantage to take of your good-nature.”