Mr. Flack was wonderful on all occasions in finding what he wanted--
which, as we know, was what he believed the public wanted--and Delia
was the only one of the party with whom he was sometimes a little sharp.
He had embraced from the first the idea that she was his enemy, and he
alluded to it with almost tiresome frequency, though always in a
humorous fearless strain. Even more than by her fashion of hanging over
the registers she provoked him by appearing to find their little party
not sufficient to itself, by wishing, as he expressed it, to work in new
stuff. He might have been easy, however, for he had sufficient chance to
observe how it was always the fate of the Dossons to miss their friends.
They were continually looking out for reunions and combinations that
never came off, hearing that people had been in Paris only after they
had gone away, or feeling convinced that they were there but not to be
found through their not having registered, or wondering whether they
should overtake them if they should go to Dresden, and then making up
their minds to start for Dresden only to learn at the eleventh hour,
through some accident, that the hunted game had "left for" Biarritz even
as the Rosenheims for Brussels. "We know plenty of people if we could
only come across them," Delia had more than once observed: she scanned
the Continent with a wondering baffled gaze and talked of the
unsatisfactory way in which friends at home would "write out" that other
friends were "somewhere in Europe." She expressed the wish that such
correspondents as that might be in a place that was not at all vague.
Two or three times people had called at the hotel when they were out and
had left cards for them without an address and superscribed with some
mocking dash of the pencil--"So sorry to miss you!" or "Off to-morrow!"
The girl sat looking at these cards, handling them and turning them over
for a quarter of an hour at a time; she produced them days afterwards,
brooding upon them afresh as if they were a mystic clue. George Flack
generally knew where they were, the people who were "somewhere in