Not knowing this, she drew the inference that something in her appearance incited public hostility. The whole of her hair was grown upon the premises; there she was founded on rock, impregnable. But, before retiring to rest after déjeuner, she had availed herself of the convenience of Hinde's curlers. Could she have left any in? What is all the beauty of the Riviera—or of all the world—to a woman who, through inadvertence or the malice of demons, finds herself dining publicly in Hinde's curlers? Or had that horrible fastened-behind blouse come undone again? Was there a smut on her nose? Had she contracted a sudden squint from excessive fatigue? People had been known to do so. Perhaps her features resembled those of some notorious, and probably improper, woman. Or she had suddenly broken out into a rash—she felt her cheeks burning—and people thought her infectious, and that was why the woman of substance, instead of passing the salt, only glared at her and drew her impeccable skirts away from contact with hers.
Having reduced the waiter, who happened to be an Italian, to the verge of imbecility by demanding salt of him in this same German tongue, and aggravated his confusion by a further request for bread, in reply to which he brought mustard, pepper, and lemons in succession, she was at last rescued by the thin man, who, divining her wants by the light of reason and supplying them, plaintively explained the waiter's nationality and ignorance of German from behind the stocks, which he pushed aside, suspecting that they concealed a better view.
Amply rewarded by a smile and a "Danke sehr," the thin man ventured upon a hope that the donkey-ride had turned out better than it looked.
"How it looked I don't know," she said, "but it couldn't possibly have looked worse than it felt," and was met by the cheerful assurance that the anguish of riding donkeys up stone stairs was nothing to the torture of riding them down. Then, cheered by the persuasion that the thin man could appreciate beauty, even with a smut on its nose or curlers in its hair, she drew from him that he had already spent a couple of weeks at Les Oliviers, and asked what kind of weather had prevailed, and how far they were from shops, in her native tongue, until a bowl of salad travelling in the rear of a dish of chicken came to a dead stop near the woman of substance, whereupon terror of the latter's disapproving eye threw her back to the brain-fold in which her German was located, and she meekly asked for the salad in that tongue.
"I suppose you mean salad," was the severe reply that accompanied the plumping of the bowl on the table by her side. "You seem to speak English fairly well. Where did you pick up that accent?"
"I—I really don't know," she faltered. "I didn't know I had an accent. But I came quite honestly by it," she added hastily.
Just then a sound from some one dining at a little table immediately behind her, something between a splutter, a cough, and a chuckle, made her turn sharply, with a gasp that began by being a suppressed cry, and look straight into the bearded, goggled face of that miserable Anarchist, whose sinister gaze fell before the fearless interrogation of hers. As she wrote afterwards to her husband, it was a very damaging feature in his character that this truculent creature could never look her straight in the face.
"Then the woman of mystery can't be far off," she reflected, after recovering from the first shock of being pursued by this objectionable person to her remote mountain fastness. "But I leave the place to-morrow, if I have to ride down those rocks on a rhinoceros. He gives me the creeps, glowering at me behind those horrid goggles."