ings. She thought that in an hotel there would be more
scope, more chance of things happening.

Jane was always on the look-out for things happening. He saw her now,
with her happy eyes, and her little, tilted nose, sniffing the air,
scanning the horizon.

He knew Jane and her adventures well. They were purely, pathetically
vicarious. Jane was the thrall of her own sympathy. So was he. At a hint
she was off, and he after her, on wild paths of inference, on perilous
oceans of conjecture. Only he moved more slowly, and he knew the end of
it. He had seen, before now, her joyous leap to land, on shores of
manifest disaster. He protested against that jumping to conclusions. He,
for his part, took conclusions in his stride.

But Jane was always listening for a call from some foreign country of
the soul. She was always entering surreptitiously into other people's
feelings. They never caught her at it, never suspected her soft-footed,
innocent intrusions.

She was wondering now whether they would have to make friends with any
of the visitors. She hoped not, because that would spoil it, the
adventure. People had a way of telling her their secrets, and Jane
preferred not to be told. All she wanted was an inkling, a clue; the
slenderer the better.

The guests as yet assembled were not conspicuously interesting.

There was a clergyman dining gloomily at a table by himself. There was a
gray group of middle-aged ladies next to him. There was Colonel Hankin
and his wife. They had arrived with the Lucys in the hotel 'bus, and
their names were entered above Robert's in the visitors' book. They
marked him with manifest approval as one of themselves, and they looked
all pink perfection and silver white propriety. There was the old lady
who did nothing but knit. She had arrived in a fly, knitting. She was
knitting now, between the courses. When she caught sight of the Lucys
she smiled at them over her knitting. They had found her, before dinner,
with her feet entangled in a skein of worsted. Jane had shown tenderness
in disentangling her.

It was almost as if they had made friends already.

Jane's eyes roamed and lighted on a fat, wine-faced man. Lucy saw them.
He teased her, challenged her. She didn't think, did she, she could do
anything with him?

No. Jane thought not. He wasn't interesting. There was nothing that you
could take hold of, except that he seemed to be very fond of wine, poor
old thing. But then, you had to be fo