Swinton’s weather prophecy had proved true to a shade. The night was dark as pitch, only of a dun colour on account of the fog.
And this was so thick that late fashionables, riding home in their grand carriages, were preceded each carriage by a pair of linkmen.
Along Piccadilly and all through Mayfair, torches were glaring through the thick vapour; the tongues of their bearers filling the streets with jargon.
Farther on across Oxford Street there were fewer of them; and beyond Portman Square they ceased to be seen altogether—so that the cab, a four-wheeler, containing the Count de Valmy and his countess, crept slowly along Baker Street, its lamps illuminating a circle of scarce six feet around it.
“It will do,” said Swinton to himself, craning his neck out of the window, and scrutinising the night.
He had made this reflection before, as, first of his party, he came out on the steps of the Café d’Europe.
He did not speak it aloud, though, for that matter, his wife would not have heard him. Not even had he shouted it in her ear. She was asleep in a corner of the cab.
Before this she had been a “little noisy,” singing snatches of a song, and trying to repeat the words of an ambiguous jeu d’esprit she had heard that evening for the first time.
She was now altogether unconscious of where she was, or in what company—as proved by her occasionally waking up, calling out “Spooney!”—addressing her husband as the other count, and sometimes as “Kate the coper!”
Her own count appeared to be unusually careful of her. He took much pains to keep her quiet; but more in making her comfortable. She had on a long cloth cloak of ample dimensions—a sort of night wrapper. This he adjusted over her shoulders, buttoning it close around her throat that her chest should not be exposed to the fog.