Halsey started to say something, but saw the gleam and checked himself.
“Dinner, then?” he asked.
“No, I am engaged for dinner also. But I shall be back at five. Call me up,” and she nodded curtly and turned definitely away.
Selden, glancing back as they mounted the steps together, saw that Halsey was still standing there, hat in hand, staring after them with a look anything but pleasant. Yes, the fool must be jealous; but even then he had no right to speak to the countess so rudely. However, he wasn’t going to waste any time over Halsey, and he put him definitely out of his mind.
He stopped a second at the hotel to order a car sent on to Eze, and ten minutes later they were in the funicular, and its little engine was puffing and panting as it pushed them steeply upward toward La Turbie, with Monaco and the serrated coast opening out superbly below.
The carriage was filled with tweed-dad English on their way to the golf course on Mont Agel, and the feminine members of the party regarded Selden and his companion with evident distrust, as of another world, while the men seemed loftily unaware of their existence. It always amused Selden, this barrier with which the average Englishman tries to surround himself in public, and he watched now with a smile as the party, like a herd of deer scenting danger, drew together into a compact mass and hastily got the barrier into place.
As he glanced at his companion, he saw that she was smiling, too, though it might have been with pleasure at the magnificent panorama opening below them, upon which her eyes were fixed.
For the first time that morning he had the chance to take a really good look at her. She had no reason to fear the light, though there was nothing girlish about her; indeed, she looked a little older than she had the night before—thirty, perhaps. Every line of her face bespoke the mature woman of the world, but the flesh was smooth and firm, the eyes unshadowed, the lips fresh and rounding upward a little at the corners. It was not so arresting as when he had first seen it—that quality had perhaps been due to art—but it was still unusual, with a suggestion of the unplumbed and unfamiliar—of age-old jealousies and intrigues and ambitions. It had race, as distinguished from ancestry. In fact, Selden doubted if there was any ancestry—that was one of the things she would tell him. For he was determined now that he would have her story—and not only her own, but Lappo’s and Danilo’s. He knew exactly where he was going to take her to unfold it, and exactly what he was going to say.
She felt his eyes upon her face, and glanced at him, and smiled, and looked away again. And presently the engine shrieked and panted to a stop and they clambered out.
Sixteen hundred feet below them Monaco lay glittering in the sun, while to right and left stretched the indented coast, from the chersonese beyond Beaulieu to Bordighera and the Italian hills, with the blue, blue sea mounting to an horizon which seemed grey by contrast—a panorama which, perhaps, is equalled nowhere on earth.