"No—no! I—feel a little odd, that's all."
"Oh, it isn't the vanishing coming on already? We're a long way from our hotel yet."
Hugh drove mechanically, though sky and sea and mountains seemed to be seething together, as if in the convulsions of an earthquake.
Her child! And her husband—what of him? The little one said he was lost; that he had not been kind. Hugh gritted his teeth together, and heard only the singing of his blood in his ears. Was the man dead, or had he but disappeared? In any case, she was here, alone in Monte Carlo, with her child; poor, unhappy, working by day, crying by night. He must see her, at once—at once.
Yet—what if it were not she, after all? If the name were a coincidence? There might be other Evelyn Cliffords in the world. It must be that this was another. His Evelyn had married a rich and titled Englishman. She was Lady Clifford. The things that had happened to Rosemary's Angel could not have happened to her. Still, he must know, and know quickly.
"Where do you live, little Rosemary?" he asked, grimly schooling his voice, when he felt that he could trust himself to speak.
"The Hotel Pensior Beau Soleil, Rue Girasole, in the Condamine, Monte Carlo," answered the child, as if she were repeating a lesson she had been taught to rattle off by heart.
Lost as he was to most external things, Hugh roused himself to some surprise at the name of the hotel.
"Why, that is where Mademoiselle de Lavalette and her mother live!" he exclaimed.
"They're the ladies Angel lent the money to, because she was so sorry for them," said Rosemary. "I've heard them talking about it with her, and saying they can't pay it back. They're angry with her for asking, but she had to, you see. When they go past us in the dining-room they turn their backs."