“Very well. It would be rather stupid.”
“Glad you see the point. By the way, what have you told the police you are? I longed to write anarchist and see what would happen. I compromised by writing, ‘Proprietor of a Free Lunch Counter and Antigraft Sausage Factory.’ ”
“You didn’t!”
“Cross my heart.”
“I hope you’ll have a visit from the police first thing in the morning. I wrote ‘Ward in Chancery’; thought that rather funny.”
“Best English joke I ever heard! Well, go to bed, Princess of the Tower. Mind you stay on it.”
Lord Dark had been detained at the last minute, and Julia easily had been persuaded to go on alone with Tay. Both had made merry at first over the mock elopement; but the trains were crowded and cold, the wait at Cologne was long and colder still, and both were unsentimentally relieved to arrive at their destination. Here, at least, in the beautiful city of Munich, they really could enjoy a day or two of complete liberty. Julia had not had the faintest notion of secluding herself.
On the following morning as Tay left his hotel he saw her waiting in front of her own. As she smiled and waved her hand he experienced a slight agreeable shock. “Aha!” he thought. “I really believe she has switched off. For all mercies, etc.”
Julia’s eyes were dancing with anticipation, the firm lines of her mouth had relaxed, and it looked even younger than when he first met her, for then it had curved with some of that bitterness of youth which she had long since outgrown; although it had been replaced first by a cynical humor and then by pride and determination. This morning she was smiling almost as she may have smiled through her first party at Government House. And she was looking remarkably pretty in her forest-green tweed, and the sable toque and stole she had taken from their long storage.
“Did you ever feel such air?” she cried. “After the heavy dampness of London, it goes to one’s head. I can almost see the Alps, as well as feel them.”