第15章

- taking a chance, I think.Would you care to take such a chance?" "What sort of a chance?""May I visit you this evening at your hotel?"Just for an instant Sara Lee hesitated.There was Harvey at home.He would not like her receiving a call from any man.And Harvey did not like foreigners.He always said they had no respect for women.It struck her suddenly what Harvey would call Henri's bowing and his kissing her hand, and his passionate gesticulations when he was excited.He would call it all tomfool nonsense.

And she recalled his final words, his arms so close about her that she could hardly breathe, his voice husky with emotion.

"Just let me hear of any of those foreigners bothering you," he said, "and I'll go over and wipe out the whole damned nation."It had not sounded funny then.It was not funny now."Please come," said Sara Lee in a small voice.

The other gentlemen bowed profoundly.Sara Lee, rather at a loss, gave them a friendly smile that included them all.And then she and Henri were walking up the stairs and to the entrance, Henri's tall figure the target for many women's eyes.He, however, saw no one but Sara Lee.

Henri, too, called a taxicab.Every one in London seemed to ride in taxis.And he bent over her hand, once she was in the car, but he did not kiss it.

"It is very kind of you, what you are doing," he said."But, then, you Americans are all kind.And wonderful."Back at Morley's Hotel Sara Lee had a short conversation with Harvey's picture.

"You are entirely wrong, dear," she said.She was brushing her hair at the time, and it is rather a pity that it was a profile picture and that Harvey's pictured eyes were looking off into space - that is, a piece of white canvas on a frame, used by photographers to reflect the light into the eyes.For Sara Lee with her hair down was even lovelier than with it up."You were wrong.They are different, but they are kind and polite.And very, very respectful.And he is coming on business."She intended at first to make no change in her frock.After all, it was not a social call, and if she did not dress it would put things on the right footing.

But slipping along the corridor after her bath, clad in a kimono and slippers and extremely nervous, she encountered a young woman on her way to dinner, and she was dressed in that combination of street skirt and evening blouse that some Englishwomen from the outlying districts still affect.And Sara Lee thereupon decided to dress.She called in the elderly maid, who was already her slave, and together they went over her clothes.

It was the maid, perhaps; then who brought into Sara Lee's life the strange and mad infatuation for her that was gradually to become a dominant issue in the next few months.For the maid chose a white dress, a soft and young affair in which Sara Lee looked like the heart of a rose.

"I always like to see a young lady in white, miss," said the maid."Especially when there's a healthy skin."So Sara Lee ate her dinner alone, such a dinner as a healthy skin and body demanded.And she watched tall young Englishwomen with fine shoulders go out with English officers in khaki, and listened to a babel of high English voices, and - felt extremely alone and very subdued.

Henri came rather late.It was one of the things she was to learn about him later - that he was frequently late It was only long afterward that she realized that such time as he spent with her was gained only at the cost of almost superhuman effort.But that was when she knew Henri's story, and his work.She waited for him in the reception room, where a man and a woman were having coffee and talking in a strange tongue.Henri found her there, at something before nine, rather downcast and worried, and debating about going up to bed.She looked up, to find him bowing before her.

"I thought you were not coming," she said.

"I? Not come? But I had said that I would come, mademoiselle.I may sit down?"Sara Lee moved over on the velvet sofa, and Henri lowered his long body onto it.Lowered his voice, too, for the man and woman were staringat him.