Page:E Nesbit - The Literary Sense.djvu/288

276 keel across the blue and gold of the Channel, in the dusty train from Ostend—even in the little open carriage that carried her and her severely moderate luggage from the station at Bruges to the Hôtel du Panier d'Or. She had thought of him so much that it was no surprise to her to see him there, drinking coffee at one of the little tables which the hotel throws out like tentacles into the Grande Place.

There he sat, in a grey flannel suit. His back was towards her, but she would have known the set of his shoulders anywhere, and the turn of his head. He was talking to someone—a lady, handsome, but older than he—oh! evidently much older.

Elizabeth made the transit from carriage to hotel door in one swift, quiet movement. He did not see her, but the lady facing him put up a tortoiseshell-handled lorgnon and gazed through it and through narrowed eyelids at the new comer.

Elizabeth reappeared no more that evening. It was the waiter who came out to dismiss the carriage and superintend the bringing in of the luggage. Elizabeth, stumbling in a maze of forgotten French, was met at the stair-foot by a