“Good heavens!” I gasped, but not audibly, as her face grew clear to my startled sight. “The Grand Duchess her self!”
“I am glad to see you, Mr. Wainwright,” her Highness began, in English. “X——— is a dull little place—oh, believe me, the dullest of its size in Christendom—and they tell me you are an amusing man. I trust they tell the truth.”
Of course the reader has foreseen it from the outset; otherwise why should I be detaining him with this anecdote? But upon me it came as a thunderbolt; and in my emotion I forgot myself, and exclaimed aloud, “Sebastian Roch!” The face of the Grand Duchess had haunted me with a sense of familiarity; the voice of my redheaded officer in the carriage had seemed not strange to me; but now that I saw the face, and heard the voice, at one and the same time, all was clear—“Sebastian Roch!”
“You said——?” the gracious lady questioned, arching her eyes.
“Nothing, madame. I was about to thank your Highness for her kindness, but——”
“But your mind wandered, and you made some irrelevant military observation about a bastion rock. It is, perhaps, aphasia.”
“Very probably,” I assented.
“But you are a man of honour, are you not?”
“I hope so.”
“The English generally are. You can keep a State secret, especially when you happen to have learned it by a sort of accident, can you not?”