“Oh, come, you knew him quite well. You said so in London. I am not exactly the silly young thing I look, Mr. Fitzroy, and Count Marigny’s coincidences are a trifle far-fetched. Both he and Captain Devar fully understood what they were doing when they arranged to meet in Bristol, and somebody must have fired a very big gun quite close to the fat little man that he should be scared off the instant he set eyes on me.”
Then Medenham resolved to end a catechism that opened up illimitable vistas, for he did not want to lose Cynthia just yet, and there was no knowing what she might do if she suspected the truth. Although, if the situation were strictly dissected, Mrs. Devar’s chaperonage was as useful to him as the lady herself intended it to be to Marigny, there was a vital difference between the two sets of circumstances. He had been pitchforked by fate into the company of a charming girl whom he was learning to love as he had never loved woman before, whereas the members of the money-hunting gang whose scheme he had accidentally overheard at Brighton were engaged in a deliberate intrigue, outlined in Paris as soon as Mr. Vanrenen planned the motor tour for his daughter, and perfected during Cynthia’s brief stay in London.
So he appealed for her forbearance on a plea that he imagined was sure to succeed.
“I don’t wish to conceal from you that Captain Devar and I have fallen out in the past,” he said. “But I am genuinely sorry for his mother, who certainly does not know what a rascal he is. Don’t ask me for further details now, Miss Vanrenen. He will not cross your path in the near future, and I promise to tell you the whole story long before there is any chance of your meeting him again.”
For some reason, deep hidden yet delicately distinct, Cynthia extracted a good deal more from that simple speech than the mere words implied. The air of the downs was peculiarly fresh and strong in the center of the bridge, a fact which probably accounted for the vivid color that lit her face and added luster to her bright eyes. At any rate, she dropped the conversation suddenly.
“Mrs. Devar will be growing quite impatient,” she said, with an admirable assumption of ease, “and I want to buy some pictures of this pretty toy bridge of yours. What a pity the light is altogether wrong for a snapshot, and it is so stupid to use films when one knows that the sun is in the camera!”
Whereat Medenham breathed freely again, while thanking the gods for the delightfully effective resources that every woman—even a candid, outspoken Cynthia—has at her fingers’ ends.
The simplest means of reaching the Gloucester road was to run back past the hotel, but the goddess of happy chance elected, for her own purposes, that Medenham should ask a policeman to direct him to Cabot’s Tower, and, the man having the brain of a surveyor, he was sent through by-streets that saved a few yards, perhaps, but cost him many minutes in stopping to inquire the way. Hence, he missed an amazing sight. The merest glimpse of Count Edouard Marigny’s new acquaintance would surely have pulled him up, if it did not put an end to the tour forthwith. But that was not to be. Blissfully unconscious of the fact that the Frenchman was eagerly explaining to a dignified yet strangely perturbed old gentleman that the car Number X L 4000—containing a young American lady and her friend, and driven by a conceited puppy of a chauffeur who suffered badly from tête montée—had just gone up the hill to the left, Medenham at last reached the open road, and the Mercury leaped forward as if Gloucester would hardly wait till it arrived there.
The old gentleman had only that minute alighted from a station cab, and a question he addressed to the hall-porter led that civil functionary to refer him to Marigny “as a friend of the parties concerned.”