After that, it seemed they had been together but for a moment, when a wild wail went moaning through the house; the first gong for the pensionnaires' dinner.
So loud it was that it hushed their voices for a long minute. And when cool silence came again, Hugh begged that the two would have their Christmas Eve dinner with him, at his hotel. "There's so much to plan for to-morrow, and all the days," he pleaded. "And just for once Rosemary shall have a late dinner like the grown-ups. Do say yes."
So Evelyn said yes. And it was not until they were all three seated in the restaurant of the Hotel de Paris, that he remembered he had been engaged to dine at the Beau Soleil with Mademoiselle and the Comtesse, her mother.
But he did not even blush because he had forgotten.
WHEN A MAN GOES SHOPPING
any of Hugh Egerton's best moments during the last six years had been spent in dreams. In those dreams the past had lived again; for he had seen the future as once he had hoped it might be for him.
But all through this night of Christmas Eve he lay awake; and no dreams had ever been as half as sweet as the thoughts that came to him then. It would have been a hideous waste of time to sleep, when he could lie there and live over again each moment of his evening, beginning at the beginning, when She had come into the room, and going on to the end when he had brought her and Rosemary to the door of the Hotel Pension Beau Soleil, to say "goodbye until to-morrow." When he came to the end, he went back to the beginning again with renewed zest, trying to call up some word, some look of hers which he might have neglected to count among his treasured jewels.