She held out her hand to Kendricks very charmingly when he was presented.
"Don't be terrified at finding us here, please," she begged. "I know you have some business to talk over with Julien, but you see we were starving, and Julien had to be polite to me because we were once engaged to be married. I promise you that when we have eaten we will go home."
Kendricks looked at her for a moment and smiled.
"You know," he said, "I believe you've run away."
She laughed.
"I felt sure that I was going to like your friend, Julien!" she exclaimed. "He understands things so quickly."
"I am a newspaper man, you see," he told her. "Just as I left, I was reading all sorts of things about your wedding, and the presents, and the rest of it. I saw you in the train and recognized you."
"Don't think I've come over after Julien," she continued cheerfully. "I never dreamed of seeing him—not just yet, at any rate. I had no idea where to run to, but Paris seemed to me so easy and so natural, and somehow or other it must be more difficult to worry any one into going back from a foreign country. Not that I've any idea of going back," she broke off. "I think I'm going to enjoy life hugely out here."
"But it is most astonishing!" Mademoiselle Rignaut declared with a gasp.
"My little friend here," Lady Anne went on, "hasn't got over it all yet. She doesn't understand the sheer barbarity of being a duke's daughter. The worst of it is she'll never have an opportunity of trying it for herself. Heaven save the others! Julien, I hope we are going to have some champagne. Mother never liked me to drink champagne at a restaurant. You see," she explained, "we weren't rich enough to be in really the smart set, or else I should have been allowed to do any mortal thing, and if you aren't in the very smart set, it is best to turn up your nose at them and to ape propriety. That's what we did. It suited father because it was cheap, and mother because she said it went with my style."