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.