They went up. How cool and quiet, it struck them, were those upper reaches of the hotel.... But as they were seeking their places a quick "Oh, come and look!" from Miss Walsh brought Olwen running to the side window. "Oh, here are the people----" The procession of the French _invités_ was coming down the road from the little tramway terminus. It was solemnly headed by the three little pigtailed Leroux girls, each holding by the hand another child, bare from mid-thigh to ankle, and wearing an adaptation of the sailor suit. After them, in a broken line of twos and ones and threes, came the grown-up people. First and most resplendent of them appeared the individual whom Olwen rightly guessed to be the _notaire_ from Bordeaux. He wore a white bowler hat, a white waistcoat, and he carried in his hands, which he held well out in front of him, a large bouquet tied with tricolour streamers and the Union Jacques which Madame Leroux had desired, and he overshadowed even his rotund _endimanchée_ wife in her purple costume and forward raking hat, who bobbed in his wake. She was escorted by Monsieur Leroux. Next came Monsieur Popinot, the clerk from the passports office, all in black, but carrying Madame Popinot's pink parasol. She, a plump and pretty little woman, carried a year-old baby in a corolla of lace. Then came a sister of Madame Leroux, as dark, as mercilessly intelligent as the manageress herself, talking eagerly to Pierre Tronchet, effective in his blue and red. Another _artilleriste_ on leave, evidently a comrade from the regiment, walked a pace or so behind them, between two silent young girls; then a trio of stout, bearded old men gesticulating freely, then a lady in another forward raking hat, then a party wearing deepest mourning, but wreathed in smiles, then others ... then again others.... Tronchets, Leroux, ramifications of both families, relatives, friends, and those whom it was intended to dazzle.... Olwen, gazing upon this _cortège_, suppressed a wish to think aloud of a rhyme of her childhood: "The animals went in four by four, Hurray, Hurray! The animals went in four by four And the big hippopotamus stuck in the door." This last line, she considered, might almost have applied to several of the _invités_! All of them, as they approached the hotel, stiffened, pulled themselves together as if they were going past the saluting point of a review, assumed photographically unnatural expressions, and walked delicately; then they seemed to deflate and hurry as they slipped past the corner to the back entrance to the premises.