“Could anything be lovelier?” thought Judy as she stood at her window the next morning. The wailing pipe of some street peddler had waked her earlier—a weird, Oriental sound, pleasant to open one’s eyes to. She looked out over crooked red roofs and beyond them to gray-green hills, while below, to her left, the white yachts rode in the harbor—the calm blue surface of which was unmoved by a single ripple—beside less aristocratic but more picturesque craft with pointed, dark red sails.
The waiter had brought her her breakfast in bed, but she had carried it to a table by the window, and was having it there. A few moments later the postman walked in—the casual way people walked in and out of her room she thought novel and charming—and handed her a letter from Madame Claire, which was dated the same day she left London.
“Dearest Judy,” wrote Madame Claire,
“This is just to reassure you, and explain a little. Stephen isn’t dangerously ill, thank Heaven! I expect you’ve discovered that by now. But he had a slight stroke, and was lonely and bored, poor old dear, and as I couldn’t go to him, he wanted you. I’ve been trying to persuade Millie for some time to let you go away somewhere, but she wouldn’t hear of it. Your health was quite satisfactory, etc., etc. So I saw my chance and took it. I know Stephen will take a new lease of life with you there. Have the very happiest time possible, and don’t worry about anything. I will be thinking of you in the sun. I imagine almost that I can feel the warmth of it myself; but perhaps it’s only my hot water bottle. I am writing this in bed, my rheumatism being still a little troublesome. However, I am reading some delightful books.
“Best love, dear Judy, from
“Claire.”
That wonderful old woman! Judy knew that she, from her two rooms at the Kensington Park Hotel, had more influence on her life than any one else in it. More even than Noel.
* * * * * *
Stephen was getting better slowly and with patient determination, but although she could see an improvement in him from day to day, it was not until the fifth day of her stay that he was considered well enough to go out in a bath-chair—a vehicle he despised. His detestation of it was somewhat mitigated by the fact that Judy was walking beside it, and he was persuaded, before they had been out very long, to admit that he was enjoying it. They went past the Casino as far as the harbor, which seemed to Judy more Italian than French, and they walked under the weird maze made by the tortured gray branches of the plane trees, that reminded her of something in Dante’s Inferno; then to the market place where she bought persimmons bursting with over-ripeness, and ate them then and there, ruining her handkerchief. Stephen bought flowers, and chatted in his excellent French with the brown-faced peasant women who sold them. They walked along the front again as far as La Reserve, where he promised to take her for lobsters as soon as he was well enough. Handsome cars flashed past them and Judy had just said, “I didn’t know the Rolls-Royce was a hibernating bird,” when a particularly fine one went slowly by. She saw a man’s face looking back at them through the little window at the rear, and in another second the car stopped and began backing.
“Who’s that?” asked Stephen gruffly. He disliked bothering with people he knew only slightly, and it annoyed him to have people continually asking him how he was.
A man got out of the car and walked toward them—a strange figure in the sunlight. He gave the impression of heaviness and at the same time of agility. His movements were quick and forceful. He wore a shapeless black overcoat—a hideous enough garment at any time—but there, in the gold light of the southern sun, it seemed to cast a Philistine gloom all about it. He would have passed unnoticed in Wall Street or the City, but on the Riviera in his bowler hat and his dark clothes, Judy thought he insulted the day.
He went straight to Stephen, and the moment he spoke, Judy knew he was an American.
“May I recall myself to your memory, sir?” he inquired, aware that he was not immediately recognized. “I am Whitman Colebridge, whom you last knew out in the Argentine.”