"Awfully good of you, Mrs. Druce. Where shall I find you, say in an hour or two? The observation car?"
"Perhaps," Lucinda smiled.
"Or would you rather I looked you up——?"
"I'm in the last car but one," Lucinda told him sweetly—"Section Ten."
She made her way back to that reservation determined to lose no time about interviewing the conductor. But the porter failed to answer repeated pressures on the call-button, and at length surmising the truth, that he was getting his own breakfast, Lucinda resigned herself to wait. There was plenty of time....
Now that she was extricated from it the comic element in her late rencontre began to make irresistible appeal. She picked up a book, opened it, bent her head low above it to hide smiling lips and dancing eyes from people passing in the aisle; but was not well settled in this pose when she heard a joyful cry—"Cindy! Cindy Druce!"—and rose, dropping the book in her astonishment, to be enfolded in the arms of Fanny Lontaine.
XVIII
"I feel," Lucinda confessed, "precisely like a weathervane in a whirlwind, I mean the way it ought to: every few minutes I find my nose pointing in a new direction."
"You dear!" Seated opposite her at the windows of the Lontaine drawing-room, Fanny leaned over and squeezed her hand affectionately. "I can't tell you how happy I am that pretty nose is pointing now the same way as ours."