CHAPTER XVII
MISS PAULO'S OBSERVATION
Miss Paulo sat for a while thoughtfully biting the top of her quill pen and looking out dreamily into the street. Her little sitting-room faced Knightsbridge and the trees and grass of the Park. Often when some problem of the domestic economy of the hotel caused her a passing perplexity, she would derive new vigour for grappling with complicated sums from a leisurely study of those green spaces and the animated panorama of the passing crowd. But to-day there was nothing particularly complicated about the family accounts, and Dolores Paulo sought for no arithmetical inspiration from the pleasant out-look. Her mind was wholly occupied with the thought of what Captain Sarrasin had been saying to her—of the possible peril that threatened the Dictator.
She drew the feather from between her lips and tapped the blotting-pad with it impatiently.
'Why should I trouble my head or my heart about him?' she asked herself bitterly. 'He doesn't trouble his head or his heart about me.'
But she felt ashamed of her petulant speech immediately. She seemed to see the grave, sweet face of the Dictator looking down at her in surprise; she seemed to see the strong soldierly face of Captain Sarrasin frown upon her sternly.
'Ah,' she meditated with a sigh, 'it is only natural that he should fall in love with a girl like that. She can be of use to him—of use to his cause. What use can I be to him or to his cause? There is nothing I can do except to look out for a possible South American with an especially dark skin and especially curly moustache.'
As she reflected thus, her eye, wandering over the populous thoroughfare and the verdure beyond, populous also, noted, or rather accepted, the presence of one particular man out of the many. The one particular man was walking slowly up and down on the roadside opposite to the hotel by the Park railings. That he was walking up and down Dolores became conscious of through the fact that, having half unconsciously seen him once float into her ken, she noted him again, with some slight surprise, and was aware of him yet a third time with still greater surprise. The man paced slowly up and down on what appeared to be a lengthy beat, for Dolores mentally calculated that something like a minute must have elapsed between each glimpse of his face as he moved in the direction in which she most readily beheld him. He was a man a little above the middle height, with a keen, aquiline face, smooth-shaven, and red-haired. There was nothing in his dress to render him in the least remarkable; he was dressed like everybody else, Dolores said to herself, and it must therefore have been his face that somehow or other attracted her vagrant fancy. Yet it was not a particularly attractive face in any sense. It was not a comely face which would compel the admiring attention of a girl, nor was it a face so strongly marked, so out of the ordinary lines, as to command attention by its ugliness or its strength of character. It was the smooth-shaven face of an average man of a fair-haired race; there was something Scotch about it—Lowland Scotch, the kind of face of which one might see half a hundred in an hour's stroll along the main street of Glasgow or Prince's Street in Edinburgh. Dolores had been in both these cities and knew the type, and as it was not a specially interesting type she soon diverted her gaze from the unknown and resumed attentively her table of figures. But she had not given many seconds to their consideration when her attention was again diverted. A four-wheeled cab had driven up to the door with a considerable pile of luggage on it. There was nothing very remarkable in that. The arrival of a cab loaded with luggage was an event of hourly occurrence at Paulo's Hotel, and quite unlikely to arouse any especial interest in the mind of Miss Dolores. What, however, did languidly arouse her interest, did slightly stir her surprise, was that the smooth-shaven patroller of the opposite side of the way immediately crossed the road as the cab drew up, and standing by the side of the cab door proceeded to greet the occupant of the cab. Even that was not very much out of the way, and yet Dolores was sufficiently interested to lay down her pen and to see who should emerge from the vehicle, around which now the usual little guard of hotel porters had gathered.
A big man got out of the cab, a big man with a blonde beard and amiable spectacles. He carried under his arm a large portfolio, and in each hand he carried a collection of books belted together in a hand-strap. He was enveloped in a long coat, and his appearance and the appearance of his luggage suggested that he had travelled, and even from some considerable distance.