The Affair at the Inn

by Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin; Jane Helen Findlater; Mary Findlater; Allan McAulay

'I will pick up the hairpins,' I said seriously, 'if you will—will do the rest.' She laughed and put up her arms to her head, but brought them down with a flop.

'I'm afraid my waist is too tight in the sleeves for me to do my hair up here; it'll have to wait till I get down to the hotel,' she said gaily. I suppose she meant that she tight-laced, though I couldn't see how her waist could be tight in the sleeves. I was quite determined she should not walk to the hotel in my company with her hair in that state.

'I will stick these in,' I said firmly, indicating the hairpins, of which I had picked up about a bushel, 'if you will do the rolling up.' It got done somehow, and I stuck in the pins. I never touched a woman's hair before; how beastly it must be to have all that on one's head—unhealthy, too. I dare say it accounts for the feebleness of women's brains. Miss Pomeroy's cheeks got pinker and pinker during this operation—a sort of rush of blood, I suppose; it is all right as long as it does not go to the nose. She is not a bad-looking girl, certainly.

We got back to the hotel without any further disagreeables.

CECILIA EVESHAM

Grey Tor Inn, Dartmoor

If a policeman's 'lot is not a happy one,' neither is a companion's: I lay this down as an axiom. I have lived now for two years with Mrs. MacGill, and know her every frailty of character only too well. She has not a bad temper; but oh! she is a terrible, terrible bore! Not content with being stupid herself, she desires to make me stupid along with her, and has well-nigh succeeded, for life with her in furnished apartments at Tunbridge Wells would dull a more brilliant woman than I have ever been.

Mrs. MacGill has lately had the influenza; it came almost as a providential sending, for it meant change of air. We were ordered to Dartmoor, and to Dartmoor we have come. Now I have become interested in three new people; and that, after the life I have lived of late in Mrs. MacGill's sickroom, is like a draught of nectar to my tired fancy. We met these three persons for the first time in the train, and at the hotel at Exeter where we stopped for the night; or rather, I should say that we met two of them and sighted the third. The two were a mother and her daughter, Mrs. Pomeroy and Virginia Pomeroy by name, and Americans by nation; the third person was a young man, Sir Archibald Maxwell Mackenzie, of Kindarroch, N.B. The Americans were extremely friendly, after the manner of their nation; the young man extremely unfriendly, after the manner of his. We found that the Pomeroys were coming on to this inn, but the Scotchman whizzed off in his motor car, giving us no hint of where he intended to go. I thought we had seen the last of him, but it was to be otherwise.

The morning after our arrival at the Grey Tor Inn Mrs. MacGill assumed a Shetland shawl, closed the window of the sitting-room, and sat down to do a bit of knitting. I sat by the window answering her little vapid remarks and looking out. As I sat thus, I heard a puffing noise and saw a scarlet motor steam up to the door of the inn. It was, of course, Sir Archibald.