Could it be anything but a fairy-tale? How many of that heterogeneous collection of people gathered there in that very dining-room—the English visitors, the little knot of uniforms on leave, the French family parties—how many of them would laugh incredulously if they were told what she, the celebrity's niece, was treasuring at that moment inside the bosom of her frock?

There she sat, demurely eating a plateful of those Edible Fungi of whose forest lives her Uncle made such a study. Yes, she sat hiding something that might change not only the current of her life, but of their lives as well. Perhaps it was true. What a thought!

"Some new people here today," chatted Mrs. Cartwright, who never seemed to look at anyone or anything in a room (Olwen had noticed that) but whom few details escaped; just as her eyes did not seem to be glancing about, so her lips hardly moved; but they had the habit of letting fall comment after comment, softly, casually, on every one of those details that the eyes above had noticed. "What a typical Hotel Spinster that is in the corner there! You can just see her over that young French soldier's head when he ducks to tuck in his napkin; yes, that survival in the expensive tweeds and the hair-net. Stays so old-fashioned that when she bends she comes away from the top of them as if it were over the rim of a vase into which she's been poured. How fatal it is to allow oneself to crystallize into the mode of the year when one was twenty-one! (But you, lucky child, don't even know what that mode is going to be.) English? Yes, of course. No wonder Prévost calls England 'that positive reservoir of old maids'!"

"Poor thing!" murmured Olwen, glancing at the new-comer, and of whom she now caught a clearer glimpse. She saw a woman of perhaps thirty-four or five, with uninteresting brown hair, elaborately dressed, an equally uninteresting brown face with a large nose and timid eyes that wandered from face to face.

Olwen thought, "No; I can't imagine anybody liking her—in that way!" Then she thought with a little start, "But if it were true—if all women were allowed even a tiny grain of that Charm, there would be no such thing as an 'Hotel Spinster.' No old maids in the world! How lovely!"

"Enter several characters from a French novel by Abel Hermant," pursued Mrs. Cartwright, as the door of the salle nearest to their table swung open and admitted two ladies in deepest mourning, an old gentleman with a red speck in his button-hole, and a boy of four. "The son of those old people has just 'fallen on the field of honour'; the lovely young Madonna is his 

 Prev. P 13/224 next