Helena could have found it in her heart to mew in answer.
The hot afternoon wore itself away, and presently the parlour-maid came in to lay a table for tea. This entailed a great many comings-in and a great many goings-out, and she usually left the door open, so that there oozed its way up the stairs a mixed smell of cigars and incipient cooking. The cigar smell came from the little back room adjoining the dining-room where Colonel Vautier, with tropical habits, spent the hour after tiffin (it seemed that he could not say "lunch") in dozings and smokings. Meantime the parlour-maid came in and out, now with a large brass tea-tray, to place on the table, now with plates and cups and saucers to put on it. She breathed strongly through her nose, and wore a white apron with white braces over her sloping shoulders.
From outside, during these trying moments, there came the sound of a motor-horn, and immediately afterwards the soft crunch of gravel below a motor's wheels. From where she sat, Helena could look out of the window, and from her torpid discontent she leaped with a bound into a state of alert expectancy. She hazarded, so to speak, all the small change she had in her pocket. For a moment she put her slim fingers in front of her eyes and thought intensely. Then she spoke to the parlour-maid.
"Take a tray of tea to Colonel Vautier in his study," she said, "and say that I have got a headache and told you to bring his tea to him there. Tell Miss Jessie"—Helena paused a moment—"tell her that a friend of mine has come to see me, and that I want to talk to him privately here. That's all: now open the door, and say that I am in."
Helena rushed to the looking-glass above the fireplace, and disarranged her hair a little. She took a book at random out of the shelves, and sat down with
