Julie came to the door and cried to them that the coffee was ready; then despairing of an answer she retired to her bedroom, where a light burned for a little while; presently it was extinguished, and Julie in a few minutes was peacefully asleep.
But still her mother and her lover walked and turned on the pavement beneath her window.
[CHAPTER VII]
The next day, Mrs. Vanderstein, busy with a watering-can among the pots of roses that during the season adorned her balcony, and keeping a sharp look-out on the entrance to Fianti’s opposite, was disappointed not to catch another glimpse of Prince Felipe of Targona whom she thought every minute to see issue from beneath the portico.
“What can keep him indoors on so fine a day?” she asked herself repeatedly, for again the sun smote down on the city out of a cloudless azure.
Having spent the hour immediately after luncheon in this vain expectancy, at the imminent risk of both sunstroke and indigestion, she began to despair of her hopes ever being fulfilled, and went back into the drawing-room, where she threw herself dejectedly into a chair.
“If this weather goes on,” she said to Barbara, “we might run over to Dieppe for a few days.”
Mrs. Vanderstein was very much in the habit of making sudden excursions to the other side of the Channel; whenever she was bored at home she would dash off at a moment’s notice to Dieppe or Ostend.