Adrian saluted imperturbably.
"He is English, he understands no French," Allard interposed. "Really, Rosal, I am in haste."
"The Emperor will want you? Alisov told me his Imperial Majesty was particularly difficult to-day, so I do not envy you. He is never facile, eh? Once more, congratulations."
Adrian's white teeth flashed in the electric light as he averted his face from the unconscious Rosal and entered the automobile. He was still smiling under his mask when he sent the machine leaping forward.
"I would have given a good deal to have heard your unbiased reply to that, Allard," he remarked.
"I fear you would not have been flattered, sire," was the grim answer. "I have spent an unendurable evening. Let me implore you to return to the palace."
"Eventually. Put on your mask; we are going driving."
Allard obeyed in dumb protest, his powers of remonstrance exhausted, and resigned himself to as disagreeable an hour's sport as he could imagine. But it was almost enough for the time being to feel his charge beside him in comparative security.
As if impelled by perversity, Adrian drove through one swarming avenue after another, across the square and down the street where the morning's attack had taken place, swinging finally into the dark, deserted park. Too early in the season, too late at night, for promenaders, the quietness here was in vivid contrast to the scenes just left.
Tired out by excitement and strain, bearing the constant aching regret for Stanief's setting star, Allard had been gradually lulled into mesmeric quiescence by the shifting lights and shadows. And by a freak of exhausted nerves, it was old things thrust out of sight for years which took shape out of the dark and dragged their ugliness before him in a strange waking nightmare. He forgot the risk of accident, the danger of the return through the city, but he saw Desmond's rugged face framed in the doorway of the cottage above the Hudson and felt the anguish of the abandonment to worse than death. Pictures of his trial rose persistently, details of the intolerably bitter months of prison lashed his pride.