“Such a hunt as we’ve had for you!” the matron shouted.  “We’ve been up-stairs and down-stairs and in my lady’s chamber, all over the hotel.  Where’s your father?  Ah, they did get our cards to you!” and by that token Lanfear knew that these ladies were the Bells.  He had stood up in a sort of expectancy, but Miss Gerald did not introduce him, and a shadow of embarrassment passed over the party which she seemed to feel least, though he fancied a sort of entreaty in the glance that she let pass over him.

“I suppose he’s gone to look for us!” Mrs. Bell saved the situation with a protecting laugh.  Miss Gerald colored intelligently, and Lanfear could not let Mrs. Bell’s implication pass.

“If it is Mrs. Bell,” he said, “I can answer that he has.  I met you at Magnolia some years ago, Mrs. Bell.  Dr. Lanfear.”

“Oh, I beg your pardon, Dr. Lanfear,” Miss Gerald said.  “I couldn’t think—­”

“Of my tag, my label?” he laughed back.  “It isn’t very distinctly lettered.”

Mrs. Bell was not much minding them jointly.  She was singling Lanfear out for the expression of her pleasure in seeing him again, and recalling the incidents of her summer at Magnolia before, it seemed, any of her girls were out.  She presented them collectively, and the eldest of them charmingly reminded Lanfear that he had once had the magnanimity to dance with her when she sat, in a little girl’s forlorn despair of being danced with, at one of those desolate hops of the good old Osprey House.

“Yes; and now,” her mother followed, “we can’t wait a moment longer, if we’re to get our train for Monte Carlo, girls.  We’re not going to play, doctor,” she made time to explain, “but we are going to look on.  Will you tell your father, dear,” she said, taking the girl’s hands caressingly in hers, and drawing her to her motherly bosom, “that we found you, and did our best to find him?  We can’t wait now—­our carriage is champing the bit at the foot of the stairs—­but we’re coming back in a week, and then we’ll do our best to look you up again.”  She included Lanfear in her good-bye, and all her girls said good-bye in the same way, and with a whisking of skirts and twitter of voices they vanished through the shrubbery, and faded into the general silence and general sound like a bevy of birds which had swept near and passed by.

Miss Gerald sank quietly into her place, and sat as if nothing had happened, except that she looked a little paler to Lanfear, who remained on foot trying to piece together their interrupted tete-a-tete, but not succeeding, when her father reappeared, red and breathless, and wiping his forehead.  “Have they been here, Nannie?” he asked.  “I’ve been following them all over the place, and the portier told me just now that he had seen a party of ladies coming down this way.”

He got it all out, not so clearly as those women had got everything in, Lanfear reflected, but unmistakably enough as to the fact, and he looked at his daughter as he repeated:  “Haven’t the Bells been here?”