“For one reason, very glad. Because I want to inquire of him what has become of one who was our mutual friend, and who mysteriously disappeared—a very curious affair.”
“Was it a man?” asked Mary, suddenly interested.
“Yes—a French army officer—a General Felix Sazarac.”
“Sazarac!” she gasped, with open mouth and cheeks suddenly blanched as the name recalled to her the strange conversation between Borselli and her father. “Was Sazarac your friend?”
Chapter Twenty Nine.
Around the Throne.
Mary, accompanied by the faithful Teresa, a stout, middle-aged woman in black, who had seen fifteen years of service in the family, went out along the Corso, at that hour crowded by the Roman idlers and foreign visitors.
The bright air of the spring morning was refreshing after the dull gloom of the great old Antinori palace, and all Rome was full of life, movement, and gaiety. Carnival had passed, and the Pasqua was fast approaching, that time when the Roman season is its gayest and when the hotels are full of wealthy foreigners from the north.