The band played "God Save the King." Slowly they all walked towards the hotel.
"Yes, that's the woman I mean," said Miss Compton. "Over there in the toque. You wouldn't think it to look at her, would you? But I assure you——"
Millie crept like a wounded bird into the hotel. He was waiting for her. He dragged her into a corner behind a palm.
"Millie, I didn't mean it—I don't know what I was about. Forgive me, darling. You must, you must. . . . I'm a brute, a cad. . . ."
Forgive him? Happiness returned in warm floods of light and colour. Happiness. But even as he kissed her it was not, she knew, happiness of quite the old kind—no, not quite.
II
Ellen was coming. Very soon. In two days. Millie did not know why it was that she should tremble apprehensively. She was not one to tremble before anything, but it was an honest fact that she was more truly frightened of Ellen than of any one she had ever met. There was something in Ellen that frightened her, something secret and hidden.
Then of course Ellen would be nasty about Bunny. She had been already nasty about him, but she had not been aware then of the engagement. And in some strange way Millie was more afraid now of what Ellen would say about Bunny than she had been before that little quarrel of a day or two ago.
Millie, in spite of herself, thought of that little quarrel. Of course all lovers must have quarrels—quarrels were the means by which lovers came to know one another better—but he should not have gone off like that, should not have hurt her. . . . She could not as she would wish declare it to have been all her own fault. Well, then, Bunny was not perfect. Who had ever said that he was? Who was perfect when you came to that? Millie herself was far from perfect. But she wanted him to be honest. At that stage in her development she rated honesty very highly among the virtues—not unpleasant, stupid, so-called honesty, where you told your friends frankly what you thought of them for your own pleasure and certainly not theirs, but honesty among friends so that you knew exactly where you were. It was not honest of Bunny to be nice to Victoria in order to get money out of her—but Millie was beginning to perceive that Victoria, good, kind and foolish as she was, was a kind of plague-spot in the world, infecting everyone who came near her. Even Millie herself . . . ?