And then she checked herself, and tried to convey the same question in her difficult French—"Mon mari?" she said haltingly. "Mon mari?"
But Madame Poulain only shook her head, and hurried out of the room, leaving the young Englishwoman oddly discomfited and surprised.
It was evidently true what Jack had said—that tiresome Exhibition had turned everything in Paris, especially the hotels, topsy-turvy. Madame Poulain was cross and tired, run off her feet, maybe; her manner, too, quite different now from what it had been the night before.
Nancy Dampier got up and dressed. She put on a pale blue linen gown which Jack admired, and a blue straw hat trimmed with grey wings which Jack said made her look like Mercury.
She told herself that there could be no reason why she shouldn't venture out of her room and go downstairs, where there must surely be some kind of public sitting-room.
Suddenly remembering the young American's interchange of words with his sister, she wondered, smiling to herself, if she would ever see them again. How cross the young man's idle words had made Jack! Dear, jealous Jack, who hated it so when people stared at her as foreigners have a trick of staring. It made Nancy happy to know that people thought her pretty, nay beautiful, for it would have been dreadful for Jack, an artist, to marry an ugly woman….
Locking her box she went out onto the shallow staircase, down the few steps which led straight under the big arch of the porte cochère. It was thrown hospitably open on to the narrow street now full of movement, colour, and sound. But in vivid contrast to the moving panorama presented by the busy, lane-like thoroughfare outside, was the spacious, stone-paved courtyard of the hotel, made gay with orange trees in huge green tubs. Almost opposite the porte cochère was another arch through which she could see a glimpse of the cool, shady garden Jack remembered.
Yes, it was a strangely picturesque and charming old house, this Hôtel Saint Ange; but even so Nancy felt a little lost, a little strange, standing there under the porte cochère. Then she saw that painted up on a glass door just opposite the stairs leading to her room was the word "Bureau": it was doubtless there that Jack had left word when he would be back.
She went across and opened the door, but to her surprise there was no one in the little office; she hadn't, however, long to wait, for Madame Poulain's nephew suddenly appeared from the courtyard.
He had on an apron; there was a broom in his hand, and as he came towards her, walking very, very slowly, there came over Nancy Dampier, she could not have told you why, a touch of repulsion from the slovenly youth.