He got up, and in a voice which shook a little, he said, “Shall we walk about a bit? You’ve never been up here in Monaco before, have you?”
“No,” said Lily. “And in some ways I like it even better than Monte Carlo. It’s as if one stepped right back into history, isn’t it?”
But she felt chilled, and somehow disappointed. She would have been quite content to sit on there in the lovely, deserted garden. She had thoughts that her acquaintance with Captain Stuart would make great strides once they were really alone together—that he would tell something about himself and his people. Why, she didn’t even know if he had a sister!
And yet in a way she did feel as if she already knew the young Scots soldier very well. It was as if they were bound by a strong invisible link the one to the other. She remembered the wonderful gentleness and kindness of his manner when she had come up breathless to the hotel door yesterday morning, her face blurred with crying. He had seemed to understand exactly what she was feeling, and he had soothed and comforted her. But now, this afternoon, he seemed quite unlike the man whom she had first told of her hideous discovery.
“I think I must be going up to La Solitude soon,” she said rather nervously. “Beppo Polda is arriving to-morrow, and they’re having a kind of spring cleaning in his honour;” she smiled a little. “I said I’d help Cristina with it.”
“Surely you needn’t go yet? It’s quite early,”—there was an urgent note in Captain Stuart’s voice.
“I ought to have been back by four. It’s that now,” she said.
As they walked through the narrow, mediæval street which leads to the great square in front of the Palace of Monaco, and as they made their way across the square to the kind of mall where stand the ancient iron cannons pointing their toy-like muzzles towards France, the barrier, the impalpable, yet very real barrier, which each felt had arisen between them seemed to melt gradually away.
It was Lily who first broke the barrier down. He had just told her that early in the war he had been given a special training job and had been stationed, though only for five weeks, near Epsom.
“I wish we had met then,” she said quickly, regretfully.