“You are not boy enough for this kind of thing, I’m afraid!” And then Julian, with a final laughing nod, turned away from Mrs. Halse, and came hastily towards his mother’s stall.
“That’s right!” said Mrs. Romayne gaily, ignoring the fact that he had evidently not come to stay. “I was just wanting you, sir, to go round with Miss Pomeroy, if she will kindly go with you, and get rid of some of our odds and ends!”
Julian stopped short and flushed a little.
“I’m awfully sorry!” he said. “I’ll come back and do it with pleasure! But I have just promised to go round again with Miss Newton. I came to see if you could give us some change.”
His mother supplied his wants smilingly, and he was gone. She had turned away with rather compressed lips when a voice behind her said half hesitatingly, half gushingly, and with a strong German accent:
“We are surely unmistaken! It is—yes, it must be, the much-honoured Mrs. Romayne!”
Mrs. Romayne turned quickly and gazed at the speaker obviously unrecognisingly. Nor did the two figures with whom she was confronted look in the least like acquaintances of hers. They were young women of the plainest and most angular German type, shabbily dressed according to the canons of middle-class German taste.
“She remembers us not, Gretchen!” began the younger of the two. And then a sudden light of recollection broke over Mrs. Romayne. They were two girls who had been training for a musical career at Leipsic, whom it had been the fashion to patronise; they had not developed as had been expected, however, and she had entirely forgotten their existence.
“Fräulein Schmitz!” she said now with distant brightness. “Ah, of course! How stupid of me! How do you do?”
They were very loquacious. Mrs. Romayne had heard all about their careers; all the reasons that had led to their spending a fortnight in London; and was beginning to think that the moment had come for getting rid of them, when, having exhausted themselves in compliments on her appearance, they enquired after Julian.