Feeling her own pulse as she passed through the avenue of stares, Lola was amazed to find that her heart-beats were normal, that she was not in the least excited or frightened or uncertain of herself any longer. She felt, indeed—and commented inwardly on the fact—as though dinner at the Savoy were part of her usual routine, and that Peter Chalfont was merely Albert Simpkins or Ernest Treadwell in a better coat and cast in a rarer mold. How Chalfont would have laughed if she had told him this. She felt, as a matter of fact, like a girl who was playing a leading part on the London stage as a dark horse, but who had in reality gained enormous experience in a repertory company in the Provinces. She thanked her stars that she had indulged in her private game for so long a time.
The bandmaster, a glossy person with a roving and precocious eye, bent double, violin and all, and signaled congratulations to Chalfont with ears and eyes, eyebrows and mouth. He had the impertinence of a successful jockey. A head waiter came to the entrance of the dining room and washed his hands,—his face wearing his best bedside manner. “For two, Sir Peter?” he asked, as though he were not quite sure that some miracle might not break them into three. And Peter nodded. But Lola was not to be hurried off to the first of the disengaged tables. Fallaray was somewhere in the room and her scheme was, if possible, to sit at a table well within his line of vision. She laid the tips of her fingers on Chalfont’s arm and inspected the room.—There was Fallaray, as noticeable in that heterogeneous crowd as a Rodin figure among the efforts of amateur sculptors. “That table,” she said to the head waiter and indicated one placed against a pillar. One or two of Chalfont’s friends S. O. S.’d to him as he followed the young, slim erect figure across the maze. Luck with her once more, Lola found herself face to face with Fallaray, only two tables intervening. She decided that the charming old lady was his mother. The other had no interest for her.
A thousand questions ran through Chalfont’s head. Madame de Brézé.—Widow of one of the gallant Frenchmen who had been killed in the War, or the wife, let down by her lover, of an elderly Parisian blood? He would bet his life against the latter conjecture, and the first did not seem to be possible because he had never seen any face so free from grief, pain or suffering. De Brézé. The name conveyed nothing. He had never heard it before. It had a good ring about it. But how was it that this girl talked English as well as his sister? She looked French. She wore her dress like a Frenchwoman. There was something about the neatness of her hair which Frenchwomen alone achieve. Probably educated in England. He was delighted with her acceptance of the situation. That was decidedly French. An English girl, even in these days, would either have frozen him to his shoes or lent to the episode a forced note of irregularity which would have made it tiresome and tasteless.