When she and the waiter were both gone Mrs. Shiffney drank her tea on the balcony, sitting largely on a cane chair. She felt agreeably excited. Claude Heath had gone into the cafe on the other side of the road, and was now sitting alone at a little table on the terrace which projects into the Place beneath the Hotel de Paris. Mrs. Shiffney saw a waiter take his order and bring him coffee, while a little Arab, kneeling, set to work on his boots. All day long Claude and Gillier had remained invisible. Mrs. Shiffney, Henriette, and Max Elliot, after visiting the native quarters in the morning, had expected to see the two men at lunch, but they had not appeared. Now the two women had just returned from a drive round the city and to the suspension bridge which spans the terror of the Gorge. And here was Claude Heath just opposite to Mrs. Shiffney, no doubt serenely unconscious of her presence in Constantine! As Mrs. Shiffney sipped her tea and looked down at him she thought again, "What a setting for melodrama!" She was a very civilized child of her age, and believed that she had a horror of melodrama, looking upon it as a degraded form of art, or artlessness, which pleased people whom she occasionally saw but would never know. But this evening some part of her almost desired it, not as a spectacle, but as something in which she could take an active part. In this town she felt adventurous. It was difficult to look at this crowd without thinking of violent lives and deeds of violence. It was difficult to look at Claude Heath without the desire to pay him back here with interest for a certain indifference. "But I'm not really melodramatic," said Adelaide Shiffney to herself. She could resent, but she was not a very good hater. She felt generally too _affairee_, too civilized to hate. In her heart she rather disliked Claude Heath as once she had rather liked him. He had had the impertinence and lack of taste to decline her friendship, tacitly, of course, but quite definitely. She had never been in love with him. If she had been she would have been more definite with him. But he had attracted her a good deal; and she always resented even the crossing of a whim. Something in his personality and something in his physique had appealed to her, a strangeness and height, an imaginativeness and remoteness which features and gesture often showed in despite of his intention. He was not like everybody. It would have been interesting to take him in hand. It had certainly been irritating to make no impression upon him. And now he was married and living in a delicious Arab nest with that foolish Charmian Mansfield. So Mrs. Shiffney called Charmian at that moment. Suddenly she felt rather melancholy and rather cross. She wanted to give somebody a slap. She put down her tea-cup, lit a cigarette, and drew her chair to the rail of the balcony.