Not till Paul had ridden some distance did it strike him that the lady of the copper coloured hair had used his real name.
"The devil!" he said aloud, "how could she have known me?" But rack his memory as he would, he could not recall ever having seen her before.
What did she mean anyhow, with her words of ill-omen? He could not guess. It was all a mystery.
Paul was scarcely in a happy frame of mind that day. He liked to see his difficulties plain before him rather than to be hemmed about with mysteries that he could not understand. And difficulty seemed to be piling itself upon difficulty.
Much, of course, remained to be explained. He was not sure of the different parts which the weirdly associated people whom he had met that afternoon played in Boris's game. The young man Michael, with the large, cruel, red hands, was probably Boris's principal striking force in times of trouble. Boris himself, he imagined, furnished the brains.
But what of the red-haired woman? That she had her part allotted to her in the strange drama unfolding itself Paul could not doubt. But what part?
Paul hardly believed that she was really Boris's sister.
But what tie bound her to him? What tie kept her within the confines of this strange collection of human beings?
For a moment Paul's heart grew light within him. Was she his wife? If he could but establish that, then Boris's boast that he would marry Mademoiselle Vseslavitch was vain indeed.
Sir Paul was, indeed, confronted by a very Gordian knot of problems. He laughed a little as he made the simile to himself, until he reflected that he was not an Alexander armed with a sword who could disperse the problems at one blow. His, indeed, would be the laborious task of unravelling them one by one; nor could he see any better way than by beginning at the very beginning, which, so far as he was concerned, meant a full knowledge of Boris's intimates and surroundings.