“That’s almost the same, isn’t it?” said Mrs. Renfrew. “How clever the French are!”
Mrs. Renfrew did not speak French and took a more generous view of the young man when she discovered that he did. It fell to Timothy’s lot to order tickets, arrange cabs, pay bills and act as unofficial courier to the party. He was anxious to be gone from Paris, impatient for the big game to begin. For some reason, he did not anticipate that any harm would come to the girl. This struck him as strange later, but at the moment all his thoughts were centred upon the match between himself and this old French lady who had set herself out to separate him from Mary Maxell.
No unpleasant incident—the crowded condition of the dining-car excepted—marred the journey to Monte Carlo. There was the inevitable night spent in a stuffy sleeping-berth in a car that rocked and swayed to such an extent that Timothy expected it to jump the line, as thousands of other passengers have expected it to do; and they came with the morning to the Valley of the Rhone, a wide, blue, white-flecked stream flowing between gaunt hills, past solitary châteaux and strange walled towns, which looked as if they had been kept under glass cases for centuries, that the modern world should be reminded of the dangers under which our forefathers lived. So to Marseilles, and a long, hot and slow journey to Nice.
To the girl it was a pilgrimage of joy. She would not have missed a single moment of that ride. The blue sea, the white villas with their green jalousies, the banked roses over wall and pergola and the warm-scented breeze, and above all the semi-tropical sun, placed her in a new world, a wonder world more beautiful than imagination had painted.
There is something about Monte Carlo which is very satisfying. It is so orderly, so clean, so white and bright, that you have the impression that it is carefully dusted every morning and that the villas on the hills are taken down weekly by tender hands, polished and replaced.
There is nothing garish about Monte Carlo, for all its stucco and plaster. Some of the buildings, and particularly the Casino, were compared by the irreverent Timothy to the White City, but it was a refined White City and the Casino itself, with its glass-roofed porch, its great, solemn hanging lamps and its decorous uniformed attendants, had something of the air of a National Bank.
Timothy took a room at the Hôtel de Paris, where the girl was staying, and lost no time in seeking information.
“Madame Serpilot?” said the concierge. “There is a madame who bears that name, I think, but she is not staying here, monsieur.”
“Of whom should I inquire, I pray you?” asked Timothy in the vernacular.
“Of the Municipal Council, monsieur,” said the concierge, “or, if the madame is a wealthy madame, of the manager of the Credit Lyonnais, who will perhaps inform monsieur.”