Turning with a sigh, she found herself face to face with a figure that had come down unseen in the shadows, and proved to be that of a fellow-visitor. "Where is M. Isidore?" this lady asked abruptly in the German manner.
Hardly had Ermengarde expressed polite ignorance on the subject, when her musings were again interrupted by the appearance of Miss Boundrish's parents, on their evening stroll, with the same query, followed by expressions of disappointment at her inability to satisfy their curiosity.
"But where can he be?" exclaimed Mrs. Boundrish with irritation, upon which she was tartly advised to go back to the hotel and telephone for the required information.
"But you must know which way he went?" Mrs. Boundrish persisted obstinately.
"Indeed, I am neither as observant nor as curious as you suppose," she replied sweetly, vexed at having shown temper to a casual travelling acquaintance—a mere "passing ship"—whereupon Mr. and Mrs. Boundrish exchanged glances; while Ermengarde, incidentally remarking upon the well-known chill of the sunset hour, rose and walked in the opposite direction to her inquisitors—homewards—remembering as she went that it was not the first time that questions concerning the youth who might have been her son, if she had been ten years older, had annoyed her. The pettiness and impertinence of these underbred tourists—tourists are never of the first person; people have owned to criminality, but not to being tourists—the worst of these small hotels—people are so mixed up and thrown together.
"Well, and if the poor boy is hard hit," she meditated, "a grand passion is a necessary phase in a young man's development, and the more hopeless the better. But the bourgeois mind cannot grasp the beauty of an ideal devotion, of the unselfish homage a gallant youth gladly pays to one in every way hopelessly above him. A Boundrish can vulgarize even that poetic passion. How very lucky that the object of the poor lad's devotion happens to be a staid and sensible matron old enough to give motherly advice and young enough to be sympathetic," she reflected complacently, while she went slowly back to the house and dressed for table d'hôte.
She was still pursuing this current of reflection while she went downstairs in her simple semi-toilet, adorned no longer by tributary flowers, and sank upon the least hard-hearted of the drawing-room easy-chairs.
"Oh, I say, Mrs. Allonby!" cried Miss Boundrish, bursting into the half-lighted, empty room with her usual grace and charm, and punctuating her remarks with gurgles, "I'm jolly glad you're safe, so far. That Bontemps girl is going for you the minute she sees you. There has been the most awful row downstairs about you. Best double-lock your door to-night, and be careful to eat nothing that has not been tasted by somebody else."
"My dear Miss Boundrish," she replied gently, observing that no one else was in the room; "you are young, and your imagination is vivid; do you think it quite wise to mix yourself up with the people of the house?"
But Dorris was not to be crushed; she only gurgled scornfully, and would have made some pert retort, had not the thin man, who, after all, had been lounging unseen in a shadowed corner, suddenly glided to the piano, struck some full bass chords and begun to improvise in a pleasant fashion he had at times: when the room was empty and he felt moved to confide his thoughts and dreams to the spirit in the instrument.