“It is well that I am back,” she declared.
“It is indeed, Mademoiselle Félise,” said Martin.
She gave him a swift little glance out of the tail of her eye, before she sped away, and the corners of her lips drooped as though in disappointment. Then perhaps reflecting that she had been addressing the waiter and not the man, her face cleared. At all events he had taken her rating in good part.
Dinner had already begun and the hungry commercials, napkins at neck, were finishing their soup lustily, when Lucilla entered the dining room. The open Medici collar to a grey velvet dress shewed the graceful setting of her neck and harmonised with the brown hair brushed up from the forehead. She advanced smiling and stately, giving the impression of the perfect product of a new civilisation. Martin, who had but seen her for a few seconds in the dusk confusedly clad in furs, stood spell-bound, a pile of used soup-plates in his hands. Never had so radiant an apparition swum before his gaze. Bigourdin, dining as usual with Félise, rose immediately and conducted his guest to the little table by the terrace where once Martin and Corinna had sat. It was specially adorned with tawny chrysanthemums.
“I fell dreaming before the fire in the midst of your wonderful, old-world things, and had to hurry into my clothes, and so I’m late,” she apologised.
“If only you found all you needed, mademoiselle——” said Bigourdin anxiously. “It is the provinces and not Paris.”
She assured him that Félise had seen to every conceivable want and he left her to her meal. Martin delivered his soup-plates into the arms of the chambermaid and hovered over Lucilla with the menu card.
“Will mademoiselle take the dinner?” he asked in French.
She regarded him calmly and humorously and nodded. He became aware that her eyes were of a deep, deep grey, full of light. He found it difficult not to keep on looking at them. Breaking away, however, he fetched her soup and went off to attend to the others. At every pause by her table he noted some new and incomparable attribute. When bending over the platter from which she helped herself, he saw that her hands were beautifully shaped, plump, with long thin fingers and with delicate markings of veins beneath the white skin. An upward glance caught more blue veins on the temples. Another time he was struck by the supple grace of her movements. There were infinite gleams in her splendid hair. The faintest suggestion of perfume arose from her garments. She declined the vegetable course and, declining, looked up at him and smiled. He thought he had never seen a brow so noble, a nose so exquisitely cut, lips so kind and mocking. Her face was that of a Romney duchess into which the thought and spiritual freedom of the twentieth century had entered. As he sped about the service, thrusting dishes beneath bearded or blue, ill-shaven chins, her face floated before his eyes; every now and then he stole a distant glance at it, and longed for the happy though transient moment when he should come close to it again.