Bareheaded, with a scarlet knitted coat over her frock, the girl threaded her way through the little round iron-legged tables and past the tubs of flowering cactus outside the piazza of the hotel. She pushed open a window and entered the big light _salle_. All one wall of it seemed to be windows from ceiling to floor, giving on to the _plage_ and to that stretch of lagoon, and sandhills, pointed by that lighthouse. The other high walls were panelled with mirrors that reflected a dozen times the hanging chandeliers, the rococo gilded curves of carving, the moving heads of the visitors already at the tables.
The reflections of little Olwen's own head and shoulders, black-and-red like a lady-bird, appeared repeated in the picture; she did not see it.
Her bright glance, searching the thronged and buzzing place, fell on two empty chairs at the long table that ran down the middle of the room.
Ah! "They" weren't in for lunch, then? Nothing to be seen of "Them" until the _dîner_, perhaps. With a sigh of resignation Olwen Howel-Jones turned to the table for two near the end window where she was accustomed to sit with her Uncle.
But before she sat down, the tall Englishwoman in brown, who was sitting at the little table next to hers, caught the girl's eyes, smiled, nodded, and with a swift leaning forward of a supple body that made her look like the figurehead of a vessel, accosted her in a deep, rather attractive voice.
"I say! Are you alone today? So am I. Have your lunch at my table, won't you?"
"Oh! thank you, Mrs. Cartwright; I'd like to," said the girl, pleased. She took the chair opposite.
Mrs. Cartwright, who had been at the hotel for some days before the Howel-Joneses had arrived, was the widow of an Indian Army officer, the mother of two boys now at school in England, and a journalist under several names.
This was why, when she said she was as hungry as a hunter because she had been working like a nigger all the morning, Olwen asked her, with a shy smile, "Were you being 'Miss Claudia Crane' or the 'Wanderer through Western France'?"
"For a change, neither," returned Mrs. Cartwright cheerfully over the omelette which the frail little Italian waiter had brought to her. "I actually went back to being 'Domestica' and I turned out two thousand words of wisdom on ration-recipes--just for the pleasure of charging them eight times what my price used to be when I navvied for that paper regularly. What have you been doing--taking down sheaves of notes from that wonderful-looking old Welsh Nationalist, your uncle?"