In due time came the announcement of the First, bringing almost as many congratulatory letters as the engagement. And on August 2d Milly sailed for Australia, where she was to spend two or three months with her family.
In October the newspapers announced that the marriage of Miss Mildred Beatrice Flaxman, eldest daughter of the Dean of Stirling, South Australia, with Mr. Ian Stewart, Fellow of Durham College, Oxford, would take place at Oxford in the second week in December.
CHAPTER VIII
"Madame dort toujours!" The dark-eyed, cherry cheeked, white-capped chamber-maid of the Hôtel du Chalet made the statement to the manager, who occupied a glass case in the hall. "She must have been very tired yesterday, pauvre petite!"
The manager answered phlegmatically in French with a German accent:
"So much the better if she sleeps. She does not eat. When the gentleman went out he wanted sanveeches to put in his pocket. One does not want sanveeches when one sleeps."
"All the same, I wish she would wake up. It's so odd to see her sleeping like that," returned the cherry-cheeked one; and passed about her duties.
The déjeuner was over, and those guests who had not already gone out for the day, were tramping about the bare, wooden passages and staircase, putting on knitted gloves and shouting for their companions and toboggans. But it was not till all had gone out and their voices had died away on the clear, cold air, that the sleeper in No. 19 awoke. For a while she lay with open eyes as still as though she were yet sleeping. But suddenly she started up in bed and looked around her with frowning, startled attention. She was in a rather large, bare bedroom with varnished green wood-work and furniture and a green pottery stove. There was an odd, thick paper on the wall, of no particular color, and a painted geometrical pattern in the centre of the ceiling. It was a neat room, on the whole, but on the bed beside her own a man's waistcoat had been thrown, and in the middle of the floor a pair of long, shabby slippers lay a yard apart from each other and upside down. There were other little signs of masculine occupation. A startled movement brought her sitting up on the bedside.