I shrugged my shoulders. He lit another cigarette, and suddenly resumed his story.
“Well, this is what happened. Arsenio didn’t come back; I suppose he won a bit, or kept his head above water somehow. I stayed in Nice, seeing a lot of Lucinda, for about another week. I used to go up to that hotel for lunch or tea, and put in the time somehow till she knocked off work. Then we had our walk; once or twice she dined with me, but she was rather difficult about that. She always kept just the same as she was at the beginning, except that, as I say, she liked to hear about Nina, and seemed a lot amused at what I told her—Nina’s sort of managing ways, and—and dignity, and so on. By the way, she asked about you too sometimes; what you’d been doing since she last heard from you, and so on. Apparently you used to write to her?”
“Just occasionally—when I was on my travels. I hope she spoke kindly of me?”
“Oh, yes, that was all right,” he assured me carelessly. “Well, then came her weekly afternoon off; it was on a Friday she had it; she got off at half-past twelve. I had managed to persuade her to lunch with me, and I went up to the hotel to fetch her. I was a bit early, and I walked up and down just outside the hotel gardens, waiting for her. Nobody was further from my thoughts at that moment than Nina, but just at a quarter past twelve—I’d looked at my watch the moment before—I saw a big car come up the road. I recognized it directly. It was Nina’s.”
“Rather odd! How did she find out that——?”
“This is what must have happened, so far as I’ve been able to piece it together. Those two women—Mrs. Forrester, you know, and Eunice Unthank—went back to Villa San Carlo with their three hundred francs’ worth of stuff, and told Nina about Mademoiselle Lucie; described her, I suppose, as something out of the common; they naturally would, finding a girl of her appearance, obviously English, and a lady, doing that job. Nina’s as sharp as a needle, and it’s quite possible that the description by itself was enough to put her on the scent; though, for my own part, I’ve always had my doubts whether she didn’t know more about the Valdez’s than she chose to admit; something in her manner when I brought the conversation round to them—and I did sometimes—always gave me that impression. Anyhow, there she was, and Eunice Unthank with her.”
“That must have been a week—or nearly—since she’d heard about Mademoiselle Lucie from the two women. Had you heard anything from her in the interval?”
“Yes, I’d had two letters from her, addressed to our works and forwarded on—I had to leave an address at the works—saying they missed me at the Villa and asking when I expected to be back; but I hadn’t answered them. I didn’t exactly know what to say, you see, so I said nothing. As a matter of fact, I felt bored at the idea of going back; but I couldn’t have said that, could I?”
“Certainly not. And so—at last—she had to come?”
“What do you mean by ‘at last’? And why had she to come?”