As Audrey, alone in the cabin with Lady Southminster, bent curiously over the prostrate form, Lady Southminster exclaimed with an air of childlike admiration: 

“You’re real ladies, you are!”

And Audrey felt old and experienced.  She decided that Lady Southminster could not be more than seventeen, and it seemed to be about half a century since Audrey was seventeen.

“He can’t come,” announced Miss Ingate breathlessly, returning to the cabin, and supporting herself against the door as the solid teak sank under her feet.  “Oh yes!  He’s there all right.  It was Number 12.  I’ve seen him.  I told him, but I don’t think he heard me—­to understand, that is.  If you ask me, he couldn’t come if forty wives sent for him.”

“Oh, couldn’t he!” observed Lady Southminster, sitting up.  “Couldn’t he!”

When the boat was within ten minutes of France, the remedy had had such an effect upon her that she could walk about.  Accompanied by Audrey she managed to work her way round the cabin-deck to No. 12.  It was empty, save for hand-luggage!  The two girls searched, as well as they could, the whole crowded ship for Lord Southminster, and found him not.  Lady Southminster neither fainted nor wept.  She merely said: 

“Oh!  All right!  If that’s it....!”

Hand-luggage was being collected.  But Lady Southminster would not collect hers, nor allow it to be collected.  She agreed with Miss Ingate and Audrey that her husband must ultimately reappear either on the quay or in the train.  While they were all standing huddled together in the throng waiting for the gangway to put ashore, she said in a low casual tone, ^ propos of nothing: 

“I only married him the day before yesterday.  I don’t know whether you know, but I used to make cigarettes in Constantinopoulos’s window in Piccadilly.  I don’t see why I should be ashamed of it, d’you?”

“Certainly not,” said Miss Ingate.  “But it is rather romantic, isn’t it, Audrey?”

Despite the terrific interest of the adventure of the cigarette girl, disappointment began immediately after landing.  This France, of which Audrey had heard so much and dreamed so much, was a very ramshackle and untidy and one-horse affair.  The custom-house was rather like a battlefield without any rules of warfare; the scene in the refreshment-room was rather like a sack after a battle; the station was a desert with odd files of people here and there; the platforms were ridiculous, and you wanted a pair of steps to get up into the train.  Whatever romance there might be in France had been brought by Audrey in her secret heart and by Lady Southminster.