"Quoi? Certainement pas," said Ingeborg, who in spite of her prize for French was unacquainted with the refinements of that language. "Ce n'est pas mon mari," she said, energetically repudiating.
"Ah—Monsieur n'est pas le mari de Madame," said the young man trippingly.
"Certainement pas," said Ingeborg. "Mon mari est à la maison."
"Ah—tiens," said the young man.
"C'est mon ami," said Ingeborg.
"Ah—tiens, tiens," said the young man; and he delivered his message with a sudden ease and comfort of manner.
But though the young man's manner grew easy, after his report of this brief dialogue the hôtel's manner grew stiff, for on the slip of paper presented to Ingram to be filled in with his name he had, unaware of the things Ingeborg was saying, described himself and her as Mr. and Mrs. Dobson, and the hôtel, in which English Church services were held, and which was at that moment, though the season was over, being stayed in by several representative English spinsters, and a clergyman also from England with a wife and grown-up daughters, most respectable nice ladies who all took him out every day twice, once after breakfast and once after tea, for a little walk—the hôtel decided, putting its heads together in the manager's office, that it would, using tact, encourage the Dobsons to depart.
It could do nothing, however, for the moment, for the lady had disappeared with an umbrella into the wet, and the gentleman, it could hear, was sleeping; and this condition of things continued for many hours, the lady not coming into luncheon but remaining in the wet, and the gentleman, it could hear, going on sleeping. Then it became aware that they were both having tea in a distant corner of the slippery windowed wilderness of bamboo chairs and tables described in its prospectus as the Handsome Palmy Lounge, and that they had drawn up a second table to the one their tea was on and piled it with undesirably dripping branches of the yellow broom that grew high up in the hills, and that they were being noticed with suspicion by the hôtel's authentic guests who were used to having their tea in the silent stupor of the really married, because the gentleman, contrary to the observed habits of genuine husbands, was talking to the lady instead of reading the Daily Mail.
The hôtel was nothing if not competent. It could handle any sort of situation competently, from runaway couples to that most unpleasant form of guest of all, the kind that came alive and went away dead. Full of tact, it allowed the lady and gentleman to finish their tea undisturbed; then it sent some one sleek to inform them that, most unfortunately, their rooms had been engaged for weeks beforehand for that very night, and therefore—
But before this person could even begin to be competent the gentleman requested him to have a carriage round in half an hour as he intended going on that evening; and thus the parting was accomplished, as all partings should be, urbanely, and the manager was able to display his doorstep suavity and bow and wish them a pleasant journey.