"I—I wish you'd tell me where you got that coat and skirt," said Charmian.
"I will. I got it at Folkestone. I'll give you the address when we go on board again. My mother lives at Folkestone. She is a companion to a dear old Mrs. Simpkins, so I go down there whenever I have time."
One's mother companion to a dear old Mrs. Simpkins! How extraordinary! And why did it make Charmian feel as if she were almost fond of Susan Fleet?
"And I get really well-cut things for a very small price there, so I'm lucky."
"I think you are lucky in another way," hazarded Charmian.
"Yes?"
"To be as you are."
After that day in the garden Charmian knew that she was going to be fond of Susan Fleet. Mrs. Shiffney, of course, did not return on the following afternoon.
"I daresay she'll be away for a week," Susan said. "If you feel better we might go and see the town and visit some of the villas. There are several that are beautiful."
Quite eagerly Charmian acquiesced. But she soon had reason to be sorry that she had done so. For much that she saw increased her misery. Boldly now she applied that word to her condition, moved perhaps to be at last frank with herself by the frankness of her quite unintrusive companion. Algiers affected her somewhat as the Petite Fille de Tombouctou had affected her, but much more powerfully. This was exactly how she put it to herself: it made her feel that she was violently in love with Claude Heath. What a lie that had been before the mirror after Max Elliot's party. How dreadful it was to walk in these exquisite and tropical gardens, to stand upon these terraces, to wander over these marble pavements and beneath these tiled colonnades, to hear these fountains singing under orange trees, to see these far stretches of turquoise and deep blue water, to watch Arabs on white roads passing noiselessly by night under a Heaven thick with stars, and to know "He is not here and I am nothing to him!"