They walked on in silence.
Hercules Popeau was a shrewd student of human nature, but this simple English girl was to him a real enigma. Was she aware, for instance, that Angus Stuart was deeply in love with her? And if the answer to this was “yes,” how did she, on her side, regard the young soldier?
He had made it his business during the last few days to find out whatever there was to be found out about Count Beppo Polda. Among his best secret agents during the war had been a Frenchwoman living in Rome. He had got in touch with her yesterday afternoon, and she had at once told him the little there was to tell about the young man. Hercules Popeau had been almost disappointed to find that, as reputations go, in that curious cosmopolitan world which has its social centre in Rome, Count Beppo Polda had by no means a bad reputation. In fact, he was popular both with men—for he was a good sportsman—and with women.
But there was a certain mystery as to how he lived. He had been brought up as an entirely idle man of pleasure. At times he spent money recklessly, and then would come an obvious period of penury, when he more or less lived with, and on, his bosom friends the Marchese and Marchesa Pescobaldi.
More than once he had been associated in some big business enterprise, but real, regular work bored him. It was now well known in Roman society that he was looking out for a rich wife. M. Popeau’s informant had added that had the Count been indifferent to the appearance of the lady, he could have made more than one very wealthy marriage. But he was fastidious and over-particular. Not long ago he had very nearly become engaged to a great American-Irish heiress. But the young lady, unlike most Irish girls, had been unattractive, and at the last moment Count Beppo had drawn back.
This had been the more foolish of him because money was to Count Beppo like the air which we human beings breathe—it was a thing which he could not do without.
M. Popeau, who naturally regarded Lily as being only the niece of a fairly well-to-do British ex-civil servant, felt very uneasy.
He was seriously afraid that the good-looking Italian, taken as he obviously was with the girl’s innocent charm and beauty, would make violent love to her and then ride away—as men of his type are doing every day all the world over.
To a Frenchman there could be no comparison between Angus Stuart and Beppo Polda. Polda was a fascinating man knowing all the turns of the great game of love, Stuart simply an honest, straightforward, fine-natured young soldier. He longed to warn the girl more explicitly of the danger she was running. He told himself that perhaps it would be wiser to do so a little later on.
“I understand,” he said, “that Count Beppo is staying in Monte Carlo for some time?”