“Nothing at all, except that you lived in an apartment near Central Park, when I had pictured you on Mulberry or Spring, enriching the quarter with your sweetness. And I was tempted to go to the old Marchese and ask him all about you.”
She drew her hands from his, shrinking from the mere mention of such a possibility, foreseeing the excitement that would follow. Maria, Jacobelli, would the Marchese deem it his duty to tell them?
“Listen to me,” she said, with the somber earnestness that sat so oddly on her youth. “I forbid you ever to discuss me with any one. When I wish you to know all about me, I myself will tell you. You understand?”
“And I am supposed to bow and say the queen can do no wrong,” laughed Ames. “You will tell me yourself after the fête to-morrow night. There will be a little time between the end of the operetta and the dancing. Mrs. Nevins has arranged a special little celebration for a few and I shall have to stay for that, but I’ll send you back in the car safely.”
“I wish you to leave me here,” she said abruptly.
The car had turned into Park Avenue from Fifty-Ninth Street, and against every protest she left him, walking north towards the St. Germain, hardly caring whether he watched her destination or not. As she turned into the vestibule, the Marchese himself rose to greet her, smiling, courtly, immaculately garbed as if he had just stepped from a reception at the Quirinal. After Ames’s threat the sight of him almost weakened her; and she gave him her hand in silence.
“I knew if I but waited long enough, you would surely come,” he said jauntily. “And the time was not long. I have been loitering in the tobacconist’s shop at the corner. There is a man whom one might talk with over the coffee-cups in any famous center of the world, Cairo, Bagdad, Calcutta, Constantinople, or a desert khan in Persia. He was a worker in enamels before the war, then a spy, and now, behold, he sells cigarettes with a good conscience to New Yorkers. An incipient seer.”
Carlota was relieved as he occupied himself with his own conversation. Maria had not returned when they entered the apartment, and she threw off her velvet cloak with relief.
“I’ll make us some Russian tea, just as you like it best,” she promised—“slices of orange with whole cloves in them. Maria will come soon. She went to see the lawyer about the mistake on the jewels, something about the customs, I think it was.”
The Marchese sat erect.