“Then you are old-fashioned!” he commented, playfully.
“Yes. And I am very glad of it!” she answered, quietly, and followed Madame Dimitrius and the Baroness Rousillon out of the room. As she passed Dimitrius, who held open the door for their exit, he said a few low-toned words in Russian which owing to her own study of the language she understood. They were:
“Excellent! You have kept your own counsel and mine, most admirably! I thank you with all my heart!”
CHAPTER X
That first evening in the Château Fragonard taught Diana exactly what was expected of her. It was evident that both Dimitrius and his mother chose to assume that she was a friend of theirs, staying with them on a visit, and she realised that she was not supposed to offer any other explanation of her presence. The famous advertisement had been “withdrawn,” and the Doctor had plainly announced that he was “not suited,” and that he had resigned all further quest of the person he had sought. That he had some good reason for disguising the real facts of the case Diana felt sure, and she was quite satisfied to fall in with his method of action. The more so, when she found herself an object of interest and curiosity to the Baroness Rousillon, who spared no effort to “draw her out” and gain some information as to her English home, her surroundings and ordinary associations. The Baroness had a clever and graceful way of cross-examining strangers through an assumption of friendliness, but Diana was equally clever and graceful in the art of “fence” and was not to be “drawn.” When the men left the dinner-table and came into the drawing-room she was placed as it were between two fires,—Professor Chauvet and the Marchese Farnese, both of whom were undisguisedly inquisitive, Farnese especially—and Diana was not slow to discover that his chief aim in conversing with her was to find out something,—anything—which could throw a light on the exact nature of the work in which Dimitrius was engaged. Perceiving this, she played with him like a shuttlecock, tossing him away from his main point whenever he got near it, much to his scarcely concealed irritation. Every now and again she caught a steel-like flash in the dark eyes of Dimitrius, who, though engaged in casual talk with the Baron and Baroness Rousillon, glanced at her occasionally in fullest comprehension and approval,—and somehow it became borne in upon her mind that if Farnese only knew the way to the scientist’s laboratory, he would have very little scruple about breaking into any part of it with the hope of solving its hidden problem.
“Why do you imagine there is any mystery about the Doctor’s works?” she asked him. “I know of none!”
“He would never let any woman know,” replied Farnese, with conviction. “But she might find out for herself if she were clever! There is a mystery without doubt. For instance, what is that great dome of glass which catches the sunlight on its roof and glitters in the distance, when I look towards the Château from my sailing boat on the lake——?”
“Oh, you have a sailing boat on the lake?” exclaimed Diana, clasping her hands in well-affected ecstasy. “How enchanting! Like Lord Byron, when he lived at the Villa Diodati!”
“Ah!” put in Professor Chauvet. “So you know your Byron! Then you are not one of the moderns?”
Diana smiled.