When Lucy stole into her old friend's chamber the next morning as usual to drink her cup of coffee with her, she found the door open and the room in disorder, and she was told that Mrs. Waldeaux had left London at daybreak.
CHAPTER VII
During the year which followed, Mr. Perry was forced to return to the States, but he made two flying trips across "the pond," as he called it, in the interests of his magazine, always running down his prey of notorieties in that quarter of Europe in which Miss Vance and her charges chanced to be.
When he came in July he found them in a humble little inn in Bozen. He looked with contempt at the stone floors, the clean cell-like chambers, each with its narrow bed, and blue stone ewer perched on a wooden stool; and he sniffed with disgust when breakfast was served on a table set out in the Platz.
"Don't know," he said, "whether I can digest food, eating out of doors. Myself, I never give in to these foreign ways. It's time they learned manners from us."
"I have no doubt," said Miss Vance placidly, "that you can find one of the usual hotels built for rich Americans in the town. We avoid them. We search out the inns du pays to see as far behind the scenes as we can. I don't care to go to those huge houses with mobs of Chicagoans and New Yorkers; and have the couriers and portiers turn the flashlights on Europe for me, as if it were a burlesque show."
"Now, that's just what I like!" said Perry. "I always go to the houses where the royalties put up. I like to order better dishes and give bigger tips than they do. They don't know Jem Perry from Adam, but it's my way of waving the American flag."
"I am afraid we have no such patriotic motive," said Clara. "My girls seem to care for nothing now but art. We have made this little inn our headquarters in the Tyrol chiefly out of love for the old church yonder."
Mr. Perry glanced contemptuously across the Platz at the frowning gray building, and sat down with his back to it.