The other time I had not knocked, but this time I did so. They were as I had left them—ready in what they stood up in. He carried the little black bundle of her necessaries and his own. They took a last look round that warped and wonderful and memory-haunted room....
But I had given them five minutes with its memories while I had negotiated with Madame....
"Ready?" I said.
We descended that interior crack for the last time.
There was a sudden hush in the kitchen as we entered. The blonde heads, the dark heads, turned above the tunics of black and horizon-blue, faces watched us round the stacked-up képis on the table. But though probably little else had been talked of for the last hour, none was supposed to know that I was the Fairy Godmother who had brought the coach for Cinderella. Derry took no farewell of the copains who, with sundry other nationalities, were the French population of France. Only Jennie ran towards Madame and was pressed for a minute against a bosom well able to sustain her weight. Derry got out the bicycles from behind the door. Outside he walked ahead between them. Jennie and I followed him along the Rue de la Cordonnerie.
A quarter of an hour later I had asked Madame at my hotel to be so obliging as to allow me the use of her telephone. There was no telephone at Ker Annic, but there was one at the Beverleys' hotel, and I knew that Beverley would see to it that a message for Alec was delivered immediately. I did not think it necessary to tell Beverley what it was all about; I merely asked him to send word to the Airds that I wished to see them in Dinan to-morrow.
Then I engaged another room—an ordinary hotel bedroom, where a chambermaid would bring up hot water in the morning and a bath was to be had for stepping across the corridor—just an ordinary hotel bedroom—not a place of memories and romance like that tumbling old room over that cabaret in the Rue de la Cordonnerie that looked as if it had sunk a yard into the earth——