Page:Claire Ambler (1928).djvu/123

 wondering what goes on in 'that young head.' Something charming evidently. Certainly that impulsive little curtsy was charming."

Claire, also, thought it was charming, and with good reason. Not ten minutes earlier she had made this same impulsive little curtsy—the last of a series—to the mirror in her own room; but she had not reproduced it for Mr. Eugene Rennie's benefit. "Well, did you like it?" she was saying mentally to Orbison, as she began to talk vivaciously to Arturo Liana. "If you didn't, what's the matter with it! Anyhow, though I don't know just what it'll be, I'm going to do something you will like, pretty soon!"

But the opportunity her mother had prophesied she would make was obviously not to be contrived during the hour she sat at dinner; picturesque conjunctions are not easily available at such times. Moreover, when she and Mrs. Ambler and Arturo came out into the long corridor afterward, for coffee, she was disturbed to see nothing of the trio who had occupied the next table and preceded them, by a few minutes, from the refectory. She looked about her blankly; but a little later, when coffee had been brought and Arturo was presenting a lighted match to the end of her cigarette, she caught sight of Orbison