Devar.
She went to the hotel bureau, but a sympathetic landlady shook her head.
“The post-office is closed. No telegrams can be dispatched until eight o’clock on Monday,” she said. “But there is the telephone——”
“It is matterless,” said Mrs. Devar, crushing the written forms in her fingers as though she had reason to believe they might sting her.
She resolved to let events drift now. They had passed beyond her control. Perhaps a policy of masterly inactivity might rescue her from the tornado which had swept her off her feet. In any case, she must fight her own battles, irrespective of the cabal entered into in Paris. Captain James Devar was an impossible ally; the French Count was a negligible quantity when compared with an English viscount whose ancestry threw back to the Conquest and whose estates covered half of a midland shire; but there remained, active as ever, the self-interest of a poor widow from whose despairing grasp was slipping a golden opportunity.
“Is it too late?” she asked herself. “Can anything be done? Maud, my dear, you are up against it, as they say in America. Pull yourself together, and see if you can’t twist your mistakes to your own advantage.”
Cynthia, meanwhile, was enjoying herself hugely. The placid reaches of the Wye offered a delightful contrast to the sun-baked roads of Monmouthshire; and, it may be added, there was enough of Mother Eve in her composition to render the proceeding none the less attractive because it was unconventional. Perhaps, deep hidden in her consciousness, lurked a doubt—but that was successfully stifled for the hour.
Indeed, her wits were trying to solve a minor puzzle. Her woman’s eye had seen and her quick brain was marveling at certain details in Medenham’s costume. There are conditions, even in England, in which a flannel suit is hard to obtain, and the manner of their coming to Symon’s Yat seemed to preclude the buying of ready-made garments, a solution which would occur to an American instantly. Yet here was that incomprehensible chauffeur clad in the correct regalia of the Thames Rowing Club, though Cynthia, of course, did not recognize the colors.
“How did you manage it?” she asked, wide-eyed and smiling.