All together? No, not so. There was one fair lady, at any rate, who did not intend to make one of the merry crowd. Indeed, the Grand Duchess Alexandra showed not the slightest desire to quit the table at which she had sat from the very beginning of the evening, isolated, sullen almost! She had never ceased her watch of the official guests, and above all had not failed to mark the flattering attentions and manifestations of sympathy lavished everywhere on Tom Bob. Now her eyes were fixed askance on the Princess Sonia Danidoff, the acknowledged queen of the festivity, as she took the arm the detective offered. The white teeth of the Grand Duchess Alexandra were nervously biting her lip. The noble lady was doubtless thinking with acute agitation how she was the mistress of Fantômas and that this hero of the hour was the very same man who had sworn to bring her lover to the scaffold!
But it was high time to be gone, and the grand duchess summoned her chasseur.
“Call up my car,” she ordered, “but tell my chauffeur he is carefully to avoid returning with the rest of the company; he is to drive by the less frequented roads. I do not care to be compelled to greet all these folks, who, luckily, have so far neither seen nor recognized me.”
The menial bowed and went his way, but he was back again next minute.
“Your Highness’s chauffeur,” he said, “has to inform your Highness that an accident has happened to the car; he is busy repairing the damage, but it will take a good half-hour. Your Highness does not wish me to go for a hired carriage?”
The Grand Duchess Alexandra, or rather Lady Beltham, seemed to hesitate a few moments. She cast a dark and venomous look of suddenly awakened anger in the direction of the last lingering guests mounting their vehicles, then quickly:
“No, I am in no hurry. Tell the chauffeur to do the repairs, and come and tell me when all’s ready”—and the footman vanished once more.
“You are infinitely obliging, madam, to offer to drive me back to Paris. Instead of sitting sad and solitary in a hired conveyance, it is no small happiness for me to journey a few minutes in your company and enjoy, with no unbearable third party present, the favour you are so amiable as to show me.”
In fact, as Sonia Danidoff was on the way to her limousine, hanging on Tom Bob’s arm, the princess had observed that the latter, having no conveyance of his own, would be obliged to get back to Paris alone as best he might, and there and then she had made the offer: “Come, won’t you get into my car? You can drive with me to the house, then they’ll set you down at your destination.”
Tom Bob, needless to say, jumped at the offer, delighted to seize the opportunity of so charming a tête à tête. And soon the princess and he were talking amicably together, while their car sped through the deserted Bois along the road, lit up for a dozen yards ahead by the glare of the acetylene lamps on the bonnet. They talked, let it be said, of indifferent subjects, the American carefully avoiding any reference, however casual, to the declaration of love he had ventured to make a moment before, and Sonia feigning not to have understood his meaning.