“I doubt that,” put in Steinmetz.
“And, even if he does, he cannot come poking about in Osterno. Catrina will give him no information. Maggie hates him. You and I know him. There is only the countess.”
“Who will tell him all she knows! She would render that service to a drosky driver.”
Paul shrugged his shoulders.
There was no mention of Etta. They stood side by side, both thinking of her, both looking at her, as she skated with De Chauxville. There lay the danger, and they both knew it. But she was the wife of one of them and their lips were necessarily sealed.
“And it will be permitted,” Claude de Chauxville happened to be saying at that moment, “that I call and pay my respects to an exiled princess?”
“There will be difficulties,” answered Etta, in that tone which makes it necessary to protest that difficulties are nothing under some circumstances—the which De Chauxville duly protested with much fervor.
“You think that twenty miles of snow would deter me,” he said.
“Well, they might.”
“They might if—well—”