Kenrick was at Victoria to see Nancy off next morning. Just as the train started, she leaned out of the window of her compartment and exclaimed breathlessly:
“Please don’t think me ungrateful. I do appreciate tremendously what you are doing for me. Really, I do.”
His long, sombre face lit up with a smile, and he waved his hand as Nancy withdrew from London into the train again.
France dreamed in a serenity of ethereal blue. In the little wedding-cake cemeteries black figures were laying wreaths of immortelles upon the graves. Nancy remembered with a pang that it was All Souls’ Day and reproached her cowardice for not having laid flowers on Bram’s grave at Greenwich before she left England. The bunch of carnations with which Kenrick had presented her became hateful to hold, and she longed to throw it out of the window. She would have done so, if two English old maids had not been regarding her curiously from the other side of the compartment, the one above her Baedeker, the other above the Church Times. Why should elderly English women travelling abroad look like butterfly-collectors?
“Parlez vous anglaise?” said one of them to the ticket-collector, nodding her head and beaming as if she were trying to propitiate an orang-utan.
“Yes, I spik English, madame,” he said coldly after punching the tickets.
The other elderly lady congratulated her companion upon the triumphant conversation.
“He undoubtedly understood perfectly what you were saying, Ethel.”
“Oh, yes, I think we shall get along capitally after a time. I was always considered very good at French in my schooldays, and it’s just beginning to come back to me.”
Her ambition had been kindled by her success with the first ticket-inspector. With the next one who invaded the compartment she took a line of bold and direct inquiry.