“Isn’t it a horrid nuisance, Geoffrey, Lord Hendlewycke has arrived!” exclaimed Sylvia Beverley as she stood with her lover on the terrace before the luxurious Hôtel Royal, at Dinard.
“Hendlewycke here!” exclaimed the young Marconi engineer in surprise. “Then I suppose it means that I’d better get back to London,” he said rather grimly.
“Isn’t it too bad of mother? She’s just told me that she wrote to the fellow asking him to join us on our motor trip to Touraine,” the pretty, dark-haired girl said petulantly. “I shall decline to go.”
“But you know the reason, dearest, just as I do,” said Falconer. “Your mother disapproves of us being so much together, and intends that you shall become Lady Hendlewycke.”
“I obey mother in all things—but I won’t marry Hendlewycke,” declared the girl decisively. “Of course he’s awfully useful to us socially. Through him we’ve got to know some of the very best people in London. Mother likes all that sort of thing, but personally he bores me.”
After Mrs. Beverley’s stay at Poldhu she had taken Sylvia on a motor tour. They had landed at Boulogne from Folkestone, and had had a beautiful run to Dinard, where Geoffrey, with three weeks’ leave due to him, had joined them a few days before.
Both mother and daughter were delighted with Dinard. It is a place which in summer appeals to the wealthy, with its luxurious hotels and gay casino, its smart world of bathing and dancing, and its expensive shops, most of them branches of the best establishments in Paris. There, in the Casino, on the plage or in the hotels, the haut-monde loves to rub shoulders with the demi-monde, and in these days it is, par excellence, the resort of the blatant war-profiteer and his fat, uncouth wife.
It was noon. The gay, cosmopolitan idlers of both sexes were either bathing or taking their apératif, or else wandering about the scrupulously clean streets and inspecting the shops.
Sylvia, in her cream summer gown and large hat, presented a delightful figure as, at her lover’s side, she wandered presently along the Rue du Casino, in order to buy some flowers for the table of their private sitting-room at the hotel.
The weather was glorious. It was warmer on what the French term the Emerald Coast than it had been in Cornwall, while the life and society was, indeed, a change from the rural quietude of Poldhu Cove.