Anna the Adventuress

"You must be the Miss Pellissier of whom David has told me so much,"

he said, shyly. "I am very glad that you have come here. I heard from

David about you only this morning."

"You are marvellously like your brother," Anna said, beaming upon him.

"I have a letter for you, and no end of messages. Where can we sit

down and talk?"

He led her across the room towards a window recess, in which a tall,

fair young man was seated with an evening paper in his hand.

"Let me introduce my friend to you," Courtlaw said. "Arthur, this is

Miss Pellissier--Mr. Brendon. Brendon and I are great chums," he went

on nervously. "We are clerks in the same bank. I don't think that the

rest of the people here like us very well, do they, Arthur, so we're

obliged to be friends."

Anna shook hands with Brendon--a young man also, but older and more

self-possessed than Sydney Courtlaw.

"Sydney is quite right, Miss Pellissier," he said. "He and I don't

seem to get on at all with our fellow-guests, as Mrs. White calls

them. You really ought not to stay here and talk to us. It is a most

inauspicious start for you."

"Dear me," Anna laughed, "how unfortunate! What ought I to do? Should

I be forgiven, do you think, if I were to go and hold that skein of

wool for the old lady in the yellow cap?"

"Don't speak of her irreverently," Brendon said, in an awed whisper.

"Her husband was a county councillor, and she has a niece who comes to

see her in a carriage. I wish she wouldn't look like that at us over

her glasses."

Horace, the manservant, transformed now into the semblance of a

correctly garbed waiter, threw open the door.

"Dinner is served, ma'am," he announced to Mrs. White.

There was no rush. Everything was done in a genteel and ordinary way,

but on the other hand, there was no lingering. Anna found herself next

Sydney Courtlaw, with his friend close at hand. Opposite to her was a

sallow-visaged young man, whose small tie seemed like a smudge of

obtusively shiny black across the front of a high close-drawn collar.

As a rule, Courtlaw told her softly, he talked right and left, and to

everybody throughout the whole of the meal--to-night he was almost

silent, and seemed to devote his whole attention to staring at Anna.

After the first courses however she scarcely noticed him. Her two new

friends did their best to entertain her.

"I can't imagine, Miss Pellissier," Brendon said, leaning towards her,

"whatever made you think of coming to stay if only for a week at a

Montague Street boarding-house. Are you going to write a novel?"