"Oh!..." she breathed.... Were those steps outside the passage?... She sprang up.... Swiftly, almost guiltily, she dragged down the low collar of her frock; she thrust the packet and paper into her bosom. They crackled against the soft mauve ribbons of her underbodice.

"Supposing I'd got it!" she thought, and her whole heart lifted. She pressed her hands to her breast.

Supposing that under her own small and fevered hands (dimpled, faintly stained from the carbon of her typewriter) she held it, that recipe for setting right the Blunder of the world! Ah, if she'd got hold of it really, the Love-germ, the microbe of mischief and delight!

The Disturbing Charm itself!

Then what would come of it?

CHAPTER II

THE ACCEPTING OF THE CHARM

"What I can do, can do no hurt to try."

Shakespeare.

Shakespeare.

That day, since the Professor chose (as he often did) to give lunch a miss while he wandered and pottered about in the Forest, he sent his niece into déjeuner alone. Her he never allowed to miss a meal; he held that young people must eat plenty and often.

Bareheaded, with a scarlet knitted coat over her frock, the girl threaded her way through the little round iron-legged tables and past the tubs of flowering cactus outside the piazza of the hotel. She pushed open a window and entered the big light salle. All one wall of it seemed to be windows from ceiling to floor, giving on to the plage and to that stretch of lagoon, and sandhills, pointed by that lighthouse. The other high walls were panelled with mirrors that reflected a dozen times the hanging chandeliers, the rococo gilded curves of carving, the moving heads of the visitors already at the tables.

The reflections of little Olwen's own head and shoulders, black-and-red like a lady-bird, appeared repeated in the picture; she did not see it.

It was another image that she 

 Prev. P 11/224 next