Winn turned and walked away; he wasn't going to applaud her. Something burned in his heart, grave and angry, stubborn and very strong. It was as if a strange substance had got into him, and he couldn't in the least have said what it was. It voiced itself for him in his saying to himself, "That girl wants looking after." The men on the bank admired her; there were too many of them, and no woman. He wondered if he should ever see her again. She was curiously vivid to him—brown shoes and stockings, tossed hair, clear eyes. He remembered once going to an opera and being awfully bored because there was such a lot of stiff music and people bawling about; only on the stage there had been a girl lying in the middle of a ring of flames. She'd showed up uncommonly well, rather like this one did in the hot sunshine.
Walking back to the hotel he met a string of bounders, people he had seen and loathed at breakfast. Some of them had tried to talk to him; one beggar had had the cheek to ask Winn what he was up there for, and when Winn had said, "Not to answer impertinent questions," things at the breakfast-table—there was one confounded long one for breakfast—had fallen rather flat.
He felt sure he wouldn't see the girl again; only he did almost at once. She came into the salle-à-manger with her brother, as if it belonged to them. After two stormy, obstinate scenes Winn had obtained the shelter of his separate and solitary table. The waiter approached the two young things as they entered late and a little flushed; apparently he explained to them with patient stubbornness that they, at any rate, must give up this privilege; they couldn't have a separate table. He also tried to persuade them which one to join. The boy made a blustering assertion of himself and then subsided. Claire Rivers did neither. Her eyes ran over the room, mutinous and a little disdainful; then she moved. It seemed to Winn he had never seen anybody move so lightly and so swiftly. There was no faltering in her. She took the room with her head up like a sail before a breeze. She came straight to Winn's table and looked down at him.
"This is ours," she said. "You've taken it, though we were here first. Do you think it's fair?"
Winn rose quietly and looked down at her. He was glad he was half a head taller; still he couldn't look very far down. She caught at the corner of her lip with a small white tooth. He tried to make a look of sternness come into his eyes, but he felt guiltily aware that he wanted to give in to her, just as he wanted to give in, to Peter.
"Of course," he said, gravely, "I had no idea it was your table when I got it from that tow-headed fool. You must take it at once, and I'll make him bring in another one."
"He won't," said Claire. "He says he can't; Herr Avalon, the proprietor, won't give him another; besides, there isn't room."
"Oh, I think he will," said Winn. "Shall I go over and bring your brother to you? Won't you sit down?"
She hesitated, then she said:
"You make me feel as if I were being very rude, and I don't want to drive you away. Only, you know, the other people here are rather awful, aren't they?"