He smiled grimly.
“I thought that I must be becoming unpopular,” he said. “People are so anxious to find me that they send bullets—mostly very badly aimed ones—after me in the street. I do not understand it.”
She shuddered and glanced nervously around her. The window by which they sat was commanded by another in the eastward wing of the house. She looked at it for a moment, and her eyes were full of fear once more.
“Even now,” she murmured, “I believe that we are being watched. Look, do you see anything?”
He stood by her side, but the window was empty enough. Below, the square and streets beyond were strangely empty. A sense of desolation brooded over the place.
“I see nothing,” he answered. “I really don’t think that we need alarm ourselves.”
She drew him away to the lounge heaped with furs and drawn up to the fire. An easel was standing in one corner of the room, and behind a piano. The walls were hung with water-colours and sketches, and the air was fragrant with the odour of burning logs. Beyond was an inner apartment.
“You are the first man, except Nicholas my brother,” she said, “who has ever been in here. Remember that, please, and be very obedient. You will do all that I tell you. Will you promise?”
“Blindly,” he answered, “if you will ask me nothing impossible.”
“I shall not do that. I am going to ask you something for your own good. You must leave off writing those letters to the English newspapers.”