Radnor had gone by himself for a row. Mrs. Barnes never ventured on the water except for a few minutes in the evening. She had told him where to look for her when he came back. Everything had turned out so far exactly as she had planned. She hoped he would not stay out too long. With this one thought she returned to active participation in the discussion of Mrs. Dorrington’s nursemaid, who insisted on calling herself a governess, and hence declared that she had a perfect right to sit at the first table with the others.
Olive rose presently and walked towards the front door, where she remained standing for a while, evidently drinking in to the full the exquisite view of the lake from this point.
“My dear,” called her aunt, “you are in the sun. Let me send for your hat.”
“Don’t bother, Aunt Elizabeth. I was just going up stairs, and I’ll get it myself.”
The girl disappeared, and at that moment Mrs. Barnes caught sight of Radnor returning in his boat.
And the same thing happened during the next two days. It seemed as if fate had decreed that the two were not to meet.
But Camilla had ascertained that the Grants were to remain through the month, and she endeavored to possess her soul in patience, feeling that after all this was the very best of beginnings.
“How like him she is,” she said to herself more than once, when noticing traits in Olive that made her seem different from the other girls. “They say that men always find their ideal in their opposites, but then it is the exceptions that prove the rule.”
Of Olive herself she never once spoke to Radnor, but then so far as the girl’s position and prospects went there was no need for her to say a word. By nightfall of the day succeeding her arrival the facts were known throughout the hotel. Radnor had played two or three games of billiards with General Barentham, and the general was almost as great a gossip as his wife.
It was not until the third evening that the meeting took place, and then, oddly enough, it came about without the agency of Camilla at all, and while she was working hard to compass it in an entirely different way—seated in the writing room with Mr. McBrinton trying to persuade him to join her in getting up a launch party.