The next day Westenra was gone, presumably to Paris to give his lectures. Rupert, who had walked home with him the night before, brought a brief message of farewell to the Villa of Little Days, and the news that they might expect him back in anything under ten days.
As for Val, she went to bed for a week. At least she retired to her room, declaring a fear that a slight cold she had might develop into grippe, and that summer grippe was the most boring of all illnesses, and that she was not going to risk becoming the greatest of bores. So she lay down a good deal in a darkened room. When she was not resting she wrote many letters, and in the cool of the evening she would sit on her clematis-wreathed balcony with Bran in her arms, her lips on his hair, listening to his account of the day's doings. For Rupert's car was perpetually at the gate, and never a day passed but he and Haidee and Bran set off on some long excursion into the surrounding country.
Haidee came up to Val's room sometimes to make perfunctory inquiries. She would stare hard at the latter lying so lazily amongst her cushions, and narrowly search the smiling face. But, except that colour had fled from cheek and lip, Val showed no signs of trouble, only a vivid interest in all they had been doing.
"You do take it easy, I must say," Haidee remarked half grudgingly the fourth evening after Westenra's departure. "Lying here in the cool while we have to scoot about in the heat and dust."
Val laughed.
"You don't have to, chicken. And scooting in a motor is not so very disagreeable after all. You look as if it agreed with you, anyway."
Indeed the girl was radiant, and her half-hearted grumblings were entirely contradicted by her eager air of enjoying life. She need not have resented that Val smiled so brightly from her bed, and perhaps she would not have done so if she could have seen that when the door closed on her the light went out of the smoke-coloured eyes, and the smile withered, leaving only weariness upon Val's lips.
But on the day Westenra's return was notified by telegram Val came down very bright and gay and presided over the tea-table under the pines. Rupert had just brought the others back from Grasse in a condition of physical flop, and all three were distributed upon chairs in attitudes of utter abandon. Val, with all the colour back again in her pale dark face, looked fresher than any of them. Westenra's wire was a subject of great intrigue. It had come not from Paris, but from a little out-of-the-way place called Baurem les Mimosas, which lay about two hours from Cannes and not even on the main line! No one knew by which train he was coming, or where to go and meet him.
"I don't believe he has been in Paris at all," said Haidee discontentedly, and certainly the man who at that moment appeared at the top of one of the winding paths and came strolling towards them bore no stamp of Paris on himself or his raiment. His face, in spite of the protecting brim of a cow-puncher's hat which had clearly seen life and experience in other climes, was badly sunburnt, and he wore a truly disreputable grey flannel suit of the reach-me-down class, and evidently made for the French figure rather than for an Irishman of large and athletic build. The waist and hip measurements were of such amplitude as to give a slightly bouffant effect, but the calf accommodation was limited to bursting point; the rest of the trouser-leg would have hung in frills round the ankles had they not been secured tightly by large white safety-pins. A pair of "Weary Willie" canvas shoes completed Westenra's outfit.
"Garry!" gasped Haidee, shocked beyond words. But Bran leaped upon his father and embraced him joyously.