He muttered something inaudible—to the cook's address.
"I don't think they either of them mind, my darling Charling," he said. "You cannot understand it, but I think they both understand."
WITH AN E
SHE had been thinking of him all day—of the incredible insignificance of the point on which they had quarrelled; the babyish folly of the quarrel itself, the silly pride that had made the quarrel strong till the very memory of it was as a bar of steel to keep them apart. Three years ago, and so much had happened since then. Three years! and not a day of them all had passed without some thought of him; sometimes a happy, quiet remembrance transfigured by a wise forgetfulness; sometimes a sudden recollection, sharp as a knife. But not on many days had she allowed the quiet remembrance to give place to the knife-thrust, and then kept the knife in the wound, turning it round with a scientific curiosity, which, while it ran an undercurrent of breathless pleasure beneath the pain, yet did not lessen this—intensified it, rather. To-day she had thought of him thus through the long hours on deck, when the boat sped on even keel across the blue and gold of the Channel, in the dusty train from Ostend—even in the little open carriage that carried her and her severely moderate luggage from the station at Bruges to the Hôtel du Panier d'Or. She had thought of him so much that it was no surprise to her to see him there, drinking coffee at one of the little tables which the hotel throws out like tentacles into the Grande Place.
There he sat, in a grey flannel suit. His back was towards her, but she would have known the set of his shoulders anywhere, and the turn of his head. He was talking to someone—a lady, handsome, but older than he—oh! evidently much older.
Elizabeth made the transit from carriage to hotel door in one swift, quiet movement. He did not see her, but the lady facing him put up a tortoiseshell-handled lorgnon and gazed through it and through narrowed eyelids at the new comer.
Elizabeth reappeared no more that evening. It was the waiter who came out to dismiss the carriage and superintend the bringing in of the luggage. Elizabeth, stumbling in a maze of forgotten French, was met at the stair-foot by a smiling welcome, and realised in a spasm of grateful surprise that she need not have brought her dictionary. The hostess of the "Panier d'Or," like everyone else in Belgium, spoke English, and an English far better than Elizabeth's French had been.
She secured a tiny bedroom, and a sitting room that looked out over the Place, so that whenever he drank coffee she might, with luck, hope to see the back of his dear head.