"Not tonight, but if you wish you may drive me home."
"Good. I'll go and see if the carriage has come."
Lucy didn't want to leave without fixing a definite time for the meeting. "I can come any time that is good for you."
Simone looked into the waiting blue gaze. How stupid to have forgotten that cognac depressed, negating the medicinal powder. The sense of doom returned: Paul might not be waiting and for what reason only the girl whose voice tinkled could perhaps reveal. Sundays in a foreign land were dreadful eternities.
"On Sunday then, late in the afternoon."
"Mr. Bigelow and his party are still waiting." Jacques was as persistent as the accusing angel, and she put out her hand to ward him off.
"Tell them something."
"And the flowers?" he asked resigned, fixing the cloak on her shoulders.
"Let them die in peace, poor things."
Chapter 25
SECRET PLACES OF THE HEART
B-r-r-r-ingle the telephone awakened Lucy and she heard Vida in the next room murmuring in answer. She wriggled and stretched in the warm hollow of the bed, pulled off the stocking tied round her eyes, and saw by the back light of the drawn shades it was a sunny day. Not that weather mattered on Sundays which were lonesome days anyway spent dawdling or driving with somebody or other to Great Neck or Connecticut to the same old cocktail parties where show business people got together and jabbered as if they hadn't seen each other all week. Today was special. It was the day to visit Simone Calvette. She wrapped herself in the expensive, but worth it, soft blue woolen embroidered dressing gown, a creation of the Grand Maison de Blanc, and went to see what Vida was doing.
Vida, in a rose flannel dressing gown, was reading the Sunday papers.
