"I was out nearly all day yesterday," she said, "and went straight to my room when I came in at night, and I was down late this morning, and breakfasted alone in the corner looking down the gorge, and never moved till I went in. I couldn't move, in fact, because my Italian lesson came immediately afterwards."
"Oh, your Italian lesson," said Agatha, with a look of enlightenment. "Ah! and you found Mlle. Bontemps in the office? I see."
Having found the key to the mystery, she suddenly became so absent-minded as not to hear the question, "What do you see?" Then she began to warn Mrs. Allonby equally against the larger hotels and any in the Caravan Bay, and Ermengarde took the opportunity of finally refusing to drag her into the fag of hotel-hunting, and got into a tram going towards Caravan by herself.
But when, a couple of hours later, she found herself leaning on the balustrade by the sea on the Promenade du Midi, very tired and hot, and unable to find any room in the crowded hotels just visited, she was partly annoyed and partly pleased to see the tall, slight figure of this woman of mystery coming towards her.
"I never saw it more darkly and deeply blue," Agatha said, stopping and leaning at her side, "or the turquoise of the shoal water more clear and lovely."
The soft boom of surf on the rocks was very lulling and sweet, and the scent of the pure, azure-shadowed spray that dashed from waves breaking in fine curves of every shade of blue, with never a tint of green, fresh and vivifying. Even the subdued menace of the ground-swell was mellow, not harsh with the scream of dragged shingle, as in paler, greyer seas. It was restful to look and look, to plunge and steep the sight in the intense glowing blue, and wonder if it could be true, a real sea rolling through this mid-earth, and not some incredible splendour of "faery lands forlorn." Even the wickedness and cruelty of Arthur took a softer complexion in the light of that warm and clear dark sea. Far out towards the horizon the velvety depth of blue made the sky white by comparison; but nearer it had a liquid quality, a sparkling sweetness that promised to assuage thirst and renew failing pulses as with some divine elixir. One might drink deep of that clear wave and lose all memory of pain and grief, or, like the waters of Eunoe, it might bring to mind all that is beautiful—lost joys, forgotten aspirations, divine desires, old sweet loves.
But in a world of prose and fatigue tea was a more desirable, or at least a more attainable, elixir; for was not Rumpelmayer's hard by—Rumpelmayer's of the pure and perfumed China leaf and select company? Thither Ermengarde turned, and secured a table outside, with that broad purple splendour still in sight, and its salt freshness stealing through the palm-colonnade and rustling the feathery tops of the giant eucalyptus in the public gardens opposite; and thither, after some hesitation and consultation of her watch, the woman of mystery was persuaded to accompany her.
The last strains of the band were dying away in the dark greenery of the gardens; people were streaming off in every direction in the golden afternoon; Rumpelmayer's was rapidly filling to overflow inside and out—carriage after carriage rolling up and setting down charming costumes of muslin and pale summer tints of various texture, oddly finished with furs and sunshades of dainty hue. There was a cheery murmur of voices and laughter all around, with the solemn undertone of sea-surges booming through all. Ermengarde had left Agatha to fill the cups with that exquisite China fragrance, while she went in to choose cakes, and was just coming out with a heaped plate when she met the smiling gaze of Ivor Paul, who seemed to have been strolling aimlessly with the crowd, when he stopped to speak to Agatha, whose manner conveyed an impression of unrest and anxiety, rather than embarrassment, at this meeting.
"You may have forgotten Mr. Paul, who was at Les Oliviers some time since," she said; and Ermengarde, replying graciously, reflected that her opportunities of forgetting this young man had been singularly scanty. He positively haunted them; he was as persistent as a family ghost, or the Anarchist himself.
He proved more entertaining than either of those, however, discoursing most gaily and pleasantly about nothing, laughing at less, and listening with due sympathy to the sorrows and fatigues of Ermengarde in her expulsion from one hotel and ineffectual hunt for another, and observing that it was a beastly shame, and that hotel-keepers were a rotten lot, which confirmed her in a growing conviction that this turning-out was of the nature of an excellent joke and delightful adventure. Had Mrs. Allonby tried Pension Gilardoni? An aunt, or some such elderly and respectable relation, of his had wintered there, and found it most satisfactory and quite reasonable—altogether a ripping place. It was just along there on the west of the gardens by the sea. It would give him pleasure to conduct her to the house there and then.