Maisie stared at them as if she might really make out after a
little a queer dear figure perched on them--a figure as to which she had
already the subtle sense that, wherever perched, it would be the very
oddest yet seen in France. But it was at least as exciting to feel where
Mrs. Wix wasn't as it would have been to know where she was, and if she
wasn't yet at Boulogne this only thickened the plot.
If she was not to be seen that day, however, the evening was marked by
an apparition before which, none the less, overstrained suspense folded
on the spot its wings. Adjusting her respirations and attaching, under
dropped lashes, all her thoughts to a smartness of frock and frill for
which she could reflect that she had not appealed in vain to a loyalty
in Susan Ash triumphant over the nice things their feverish flight had
left behind, Maisie spent on a bench in the garden of the hotel the
half-hour before dinner, that mysterious ceremony of the _table d'hote_
for which she had prepared with a punctuality of flutter. Sir Claude,
beside her, was occupied with a cigarette and the afternoon papers; and
though the hotel was full the garden shewed the particular void that
ensues upon the sound of the dressing-bell. She had almost had time to
weary of the human scene; her own humanity at any rate, in the shape of
a smutch on her scanty skirt, had held her so long that as soon as she
raised her eyes they rested on a high fair drapery by which smutches
were put to shame and which had glided toward her over the grass without
her noting its rustle.
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