"Why do you frown at me like that, Miss Vera?" he asked. "What have I done?"
Jessie forced a smile to her lips. She could not quite forget her own ego, and she knew this man to be a scoundrel and a coward. Through his fault she had come very close to starvation. But, she reflected, certainly Vera could know nothing of this, and she must act exactly as Vera would have done. Jessie wanted all her wits for the coming struggle.
"Did I frown?" she laughed. "If I did, it was certainly not at you. My thoughts——"
"Let me guess your thoughts," Mazaroff said in a low tone of voice. He reclined his elbows on the lip of the fountain so that his face was close to Jessie's. "I am rather good at that kind of thing. You are thinking that the queen did not care much for the pictures."
Jessie repressed a start. There was a distinct menace in the speaker's words. If they meant anything they meant danger, and that to the people whose interests it was Jessie's to guard. And she knew one thing that Vera Galloway could not possibly know—this man was a scoundrel.
"You are too subtle for me," she said. "What queen do you allude to?"
"There was only one queen in this conversation. I mean the Queen of Asturia. She left the salon with you to look at certain pictures, and she was disappointed. Where is she?"
"Back again in the salon by this time, doubtless," Jessie laughed. "I am not quite at home in the presence of royalty."
The brows of Mazaroff knitted into a frown. Evidently Jessie had accidentally said something that checkmated him for the moment.
"And the king?" he asked. "Do you know anything about him? Where is he, for example?"