“Pray consider everything here at your disposal,” he said courteously. “My housekeeper will take you upstairs, and if you will allow me to advise you, you will go to bed. Meantime, can I send to inform your people?”
She thanked him gracefully, not too warmly, and gave him her address in Cannes.
“If you could get my maid over with some clothes I should be glad,” she said, as she went up the staircase looking, as no other woman would have looked, lovely despite the thick wraps and the soaked hair.
“But you have not told me your name?”
“Duchess of Otterbourne,” she called back to him, whilst she went up the stairs followed by Boo, who by this time had grown cold and equally cross.
She was taken into a beautiful bedchamber of the Louis Quinze style, with silver dogs on the hearth where a wood fire already blazed.
“It was really very well done,” she thought with self-complacency. “I only hope to goodness Boo will not take cold. That man must be Vanderlin himself. He is more good-looking than I expected; and for an anchorite he is civil.”
“They’re silver,” said Boo, surveying the andirons, whilst two maids were rubbing dry her rosy limbs. “So’s the mirror,” she added as she looked around her after drinking a cup of hot milk; after which she allowed herself to be put to bed and soon fell fast asleep.
Her mother sat by the fire wrapped in blankets and eider-down.
Even to Boo’s busy and suspicious intelligence it did not occur that the plug had been pulled out on purpose. The little secret was quite safe in her mother’s own brain.