“I am not going to change,” said Cléo, “I am too busy—and too hungry—”
A reporter from the Gaulois stopped her as she was turning towards the room, indicated by Madame de Brie, where déjeuner was to be served.
“Mademoiselle,” said the reporter, “I did not like to trouble you sooner, may I crave the honour of a short interview with you on account of the Gaulois?”
“Certainly, monsieur,” replied the girl. “Pray come to déjeuner as my guest, I hope to tell my friends something of my experiences and what I say you can repeat; that will be better than a formal interview tête-à-téte, which, after all, is rather a depressing affair.”
The déjeuner was not a depressing affair. Cléo struck the note. She was in radiant good humour. Madame de Brie sat on her right, Monsieur de Brie on her left. Monsieur Bonvalot, her man of affairs, with his long Dundreary whiskers, opposite to her; the rest were scattered on either side of the long table.
At first the conversation was general, then, after a while, Cléo was talking and the rest listening.
“As I shall be very busy for a long time,” said Cléo, “I would like now to give all the information I can about the loss of the yacht. A gentleman is present on behalf of the Gaulois, and as all details I can give relative to the disaster are of world wide interest, considering the position of the late Prince Selm, I take this opportunity of making them known. Unfortunately they are few.”
She told briefly but clearly the story of the disaster, of her escape and landing on Kerguelen, of the caves and the cache and the death of the two men. She did not tell how La Touche met his end, that business had to do with no one but herself and La Touche. She gave it to be understood that he, like Bompard, had met his fate in the quicksands.
She told of her loneliness, and how she had been dying simply from loneliness, how she had been saved by Raft and how he had nursed her like a mother.
It was then that she really began to talk and shew them pictures. They saw the beach and that terrible journey along under the cliffs, cliffs that seemed cut out of night and never ending, the sea, like an obsession, crawling shoreward, and Raft carrying her on his shoulder.