Slowly and with the utmost composure she went into her bedroom, put the notes away in her jewel case, and took off her hat and dolman. She laid her muff down on the chair exactly where Jeanne had left it, then having opened the door of the closet, she went back into the sitting room. As she did so, she heard a clock strike the half hour.

Henry Dulton would be unable to keep his appointment.

8

Mistral was worried and unhappy. She was not quite certain why except that she sensed that something was wrong though she could not find a reasonable explanation for the feeling. When she and Jeanne returned from their walk that afternoon, Aunt Emilie had met them at the door of the sitting room and said sharply,

‘You will go to your bedroom, Mistral, and stay there until either Jeanne or I fetch you. Is that understood? You are not to leave it until you are told to do so.’

‘Yes, Aunt Emilie,’ Mistral had replied. But – is anything the matter?’

‘Kindly do as you are told without argument or idiotic questions,’ Emilie answered, and abashed Mistral had gone to her room and closed the door.

For some time she sat wondering what she could have done to incur her aunt’s anger, yet ponder as she might over her movements of the morning, there was nothing that she could find which might be construed in any way to be upsetting or annoying.

At length, having removed her mantle and bonnet and put them away in the wardrobe, she wandered round the hotel bedroom looking at the curtains, the elaborate bedspread and the French furniture, wondering why, when everything in itself was so charming, the whole effect seemed somehow bare and unwelcoming. Then the explanation came to her.

It was, of course, because unlike most people she had no possessions of her own to leave about – no photographs to arrange on the chest of drawers, no ornaments, boxes or little knick-knacks with which most women surround themselves. The dressing table contained only the plain wooden brush she had used at the Convent, a comb and a jar of hand ointment which Jeanne had given her. It was, she told Mistral, a grease she made every winter because Aunt Emilie often suffered from chapped hands.