A painful, choking feeling--one she had very, very seldom experienced
during the course of her short, prosperous life, came into her throat.

Angrily she dashed away two tears from her eyes.

This was a horrid hotel! The Poulains were hateful people! Jack had made a
mistake--how could he have brought her to such a place? She would tell him
when he came back that he must take her away now, at once, to some
ordinary, nice hotel, where the people knew English, and where they treated
their guests with ordinary civility.

And then there shot through Nancy Dampier a feeling of quick relief, for,
walking across the courtyard, evidently on their way out, came a
pleasant-looking elderly gentleman, accompanied by the girl whom Nancy had
seen for a brief moment standing on the landing close to her bedroom door
the night before.

These were English people? No, American of course! But that was quite as
good, for they, thank heaven! spoke English. She could ask them to be her
interpreters with those extraordinary Poulains. Jack wouldn't mind her
doing that. Why, he might have left quite an important message for her!

She took a step forward, and the strangers stopped. The old
gentleman--Nancy called him in her own mind an old gentleman, though
Senator Burton was by no means old in his own estimation or in that of his
contemporaries--smiled a very pleasant, genial smile.

Nancy Dampier made a charming vision as she stood under the arch of the
porte cochere, her slender, blue-clad figure silhouetted against the dark
background by the street outside, and the colour coming and going in