"How lovely, how lovely!" said Lucy. "I wonder if there is any view in all the world like this?"
"We must find those two statues by Sara Bernhardt and Gustave Doré," said Evelyn, looking up from her Baedeker. "One of them represents——"
"Oh, bother the statues!" cried Lucy. "I want to feel things to-day, not to look at them." Her voice changed suddenly. "Lady Munro," she said very softly, "that is my boy leaning on the stone balustrade. Now, did I exaggerate? Look at him!"
Lady Munro walked on for a moment or two, and then glanced at the lad incidentally; but the glance extended itself with impunity into a very deliberate study. The boy's face was flushed, and he was muttering to himself incoherently as he gazed in front of him with unseeing eyes.
"He looks as if he was going mad," remarked Evelyn frankly.
"He looks a great deal more like an acute maniac than most acute maniacs do," said Lucy, with a proud recollection of a few visits to an asylum. "Oh, Lady Munro, do, do go and speak to him! You would do it so beautifully."
Lady Munro hesitated. She never went out of her way to do good, but this boy seemed to have come into her way; and her action was none the less beautiful, because it was dictated, not by principle at all, but by sheer motherly impulse.
She left the girls some distance off, and rustled softly up to where he stood.
"Pardon, monsieur," she said lightly, "can you tell me where the statue by Gustavo Doré is?"
He started and looked up. One did not often see a gracious woman like this at Monte Carlo.