Page:Belloc Lowndes--The end of her honeymoon.djvu/29

Rh humbler Italian inns in which she and Jack had been so happy, the people had never even heard of a bell!

She jumped out of bed, put on her pretty, pale blue dressing-gown—it was a fancy of Jack's that she should wear a great deal of pale blue and white—and then she opened the door a little way.

"Madame!" she called out gaily. "Madame Poulain?" and wondered whether her French would run to the words "hot water"—yes, she thought it would. "Eau chaude"—that was hot water.

But there came no answering cry, and again, this time rather impatiently, she called out, "Madame Poulain?"

And then the shuffling sounds of heavy footsteps made Nancy shoot back from the open door.

"Yuss?" muttered a hoarse voice.

This surely must be the loutish-looking youth who, so Nancy suddenly remembered, knew a little English.

"I want some hot water," she called out through the door. "And will you please ask your aunt to come here for a moment?"

"Yuss," he said, in that queer hoarse voice, and shuffled downstairs again. And there followed, floating up from below, one of those quick, gabbling interchanges of French words which Nancy, try as she might, could not understand.

She got into bed again. Perhaps after all it would be better to allow them to bring up her "little break-