Robert shut up the little place by the river (where they planned to live later), and stopped at an hotel in town, though he had never let the flat in St. James's Square, the scene of his engagement to June.
I began helping Joyce choose a trousseau that could be got together in haste, for they were to go to the south of France and Italy for their honeymoon; and one day, after shopping the whole morning and part of the afternoon, we were to meet Robert for tea at the Savoy.
You know that soft amber light there is in the big _foyer_ of the Savoy at tea-time, like the beautiful subdued light in dreams? Since the war it brings back to me ghosts of all the jolly, handsome boys one used to see there, whose bodies sleep now under the poppies and _bluets_ of France; and as Joyce and I walked in, rather late, the thought of those boys and those days came over me with the sobbing music of the violins.
"It's like the beat, beat of invisible hearts," I said to myself. And suddenly I was sad.
There sat Robert, waiting for us. He had taken a table for three, and one of the chairs, I noticed, was a noble one covered with velvet brocade--a chair like a Queen's throne.
He rose at sight of us, and I saw that a little woman at a table close by was looking at him with intense interest. In fact, her interest in Robert gave her a kind of fictitious interest of her own, in my eyes, she seemed so absorbed in him.
She was one of those women you'd know to be American if you met them crawling up the North Pole; and as she was in travelling dress I fancied that it was not long since she had landed.
"She probably admired him on the stage when she was here before the war, and hasn't been in England since till now," I thought, to be interrupted by Robert himself.
"That armchair's for you, Princess," he said, as I was going to slip into a smaller one and leave the "throne" for the bride-elect.
For an instant we disputed; then I was about to yield, laughing, when the little woman in brown jumped up with a gasp.
"Oh, you _can't_ sit in that chair!" she exclaimed. "Don't you _see_--there's someone there?"
We all three started and stared, thinking, of course, that the creature was mad. But her face looked sane, and pathetically pleading.