The speaker looked frowning at the stacks of dresses and lingerie.
Annette made no reply; but went on busily with her unpacking. If the
clothes were to be got rid of, they were her perquisites. She was
devoted to Constance, but she stood on her rights.

Presently a little space was cleared on the floor, and Constance, seeing
that it was nearly seven o'clock, and the Hoopers supped at half past,
took off her black dress with its crape, and put on a white one, high to
the throat and long-sleeved; a French demi-toilette, plain, and even
severe in make, but cut by the best dressmaker in Nice. She looked
extraordinarily tall and slim in it and very foreign. Her maid clasped a
long string of opals, which was her only ornament, about her neck. She
gave one look at herself in the glass, holding herself proudly, one
might have said arrogantly. But as she turned away, and so that Annette
could not see her, she raised the opals, and held them a moment softly
to her lips. Her mother had habitually worn them. Then she moved to the
window, and looked out over the Hoopers' private garden, to the
spreading college lawns, and the grey front beyond.

"Am I really going to stay here a whole year--nearly?" she asked
herself, half laughing, half rebellious.

Then her eye fell upon a medley of photographs; snaps from her own
camera, which had tumbled out of her bag in unpacking. The topmost one
represented a group of young men and maidens standing under a group of
stone pines in a Riviera landscape. She herself was in front, with a
tall youth beside her. She bent down to look at it.

"I shall come across him I suppose--before long." And raising herself,
she stood awhile, thinking; her face alive with an excitement that was