But “It will be enchanting by the lake!” she heard some one say eagerly.  And this chance remark made up her mind for her.  After all, she might as well go and see the lake, of which everyone who mentioned Lacville spoke so enthusiastically.

Down the whole party swept along a narrow street, bordered by high white houses, shabby cafes, and little shops.  Quite a crowd had left the station, and they were all now going the same way.

A turn in the narrow street, and Sylvia uttered a low cry of pleasure and astonishment!

Before her, like a scene in a play when the curtain is rung up, there suddenly appeared an immense sunlit expanse of water, fringed by high trees, and bordered by quaint, pretty chalets and villas, fantastic in shape, and each surrounded by a garden, which in many cases ran down to the edge of the lake.

To the right, stretching out over the water, its pinnacles and minarets reflected in blue translucent depths, rose what looked like a great white marble palace.

“Is it not lovely?” said the Frenchman eagerly.  “And the water of the lake is so shallow, Madame, there is no fear of anyone being drowned in it!  That is such an advantage when one has children.”

“And it is a hundred times more charming in the afternoon,” his wife chimed in, happily, “for then the lake is so full of little sailing-boats that you can hardly see the water.  Oh, it is gay then, very gay!”

She glanced at Mrs. Bailey’s pretty grey muslin dress and elegant parasol.

“I suppose Madame is going to one of the great restaurants?  As for us, we shall make our way into a wood and have our luncheon there.  It is expensive going to a restaurant with children.”

She nodded pleasantly, with the easy, graceful familiarity which foreigners show in their dealings with strangers; and, shepherding their little party along, the worthy pair went briskly off by the broad avenue which girdles the lake.

Again Sylvia felt curiously alone.  She was surrounded on every side by groups of merry-looking people, and already out on the lake there floated tiny white-sailed boats, each containing a man and a girl.

Everyone seemed to have a companion or companions; she alone was solitary.  She even found herself wondering what she was doing there in a foreign country, by herself, when she might have been in England, in her own pleasant house at Market Dalling!

She took out of her bag the card which the landlord of the Hotel de l’Horloge had pressed upon her.  “Hotel Pension, Villa du Lac, Lacville.”

She went up rather timidly to a respectable-looking old bourgeois and his wife.  “Do you know,” she asked, “where is the Villa du Lac?”

“Certainly, Madame,” answered the old man amiably.  “It is there, close to you, not a hundred yards away.  That big white house to our left.”  And then, with that love of giving information which possesses so many Frenchman, he added: