PART II
CHAPTER VI
Two men sat alone in a first-class compartment of the Riviera train-de-luxe.
The night before the most luxurious train in Europe had left the Gare de Lyon at Paris. The night had been bitterly cold, and as the vast machine swung out of the station all the suburbs of Paris and, indeed, the plains of mid-France, were seen through the dark windows of the corridors to be covered with a white sprinkling of snow.
A special carriage was reserved for a Monsieur Montoyer and his valet, and the two persons mentioned upon the ticket had spent the whole night in the luxurious cabin, with its beds and little tables, talking earnestly.
Monsieur Charles Edouard Montoyer was an athletic, burly looking young man, dressed in the height of French fashion, clean-shaved, dark-complexioned, and wearing gold-rimmed spectacles, which only partially concealed a pair of blue eyes which seemed oddly at variance with his otherwise Southern appearance. His hair also was a dead black, and in certain lights it had an almost metallic lustre.