Chapter Eighteen.
Told in the Café Métropole.
Weary and fagged Waldron descended from the sleeping-car at the Gare de Lyon in Paris twenty hours later and dispatched a telegram to the address Lola had given him. Then he drove in a taxi across the French capital, and next morning found himself in the Grand Hotel in gay little Brussels—awaiting a reply.
About eleven o’clock it came—a message by express making an appointment to meet at noon at the Café Métropole a little farther up the boulevard.
Hubert was wasting no time. He had not lost a single moment since leaving the Eternal City, and on that rush northward his mind was ever centred upon the crisis between the two Powers which had evidently occurred.
He had left word with Peters that if any person called, or anyone rang up on the telephone, the reply was that he had left Rome on urgent business for three or four days. On no account was his man to say whither he had gone.
He flung off his coat and cast himself upon the bed to rest for an hour. But the noise in the busy boulevard outside was irritating, worse even than the roar of the great international express which had borne him half across Europe.
Presently he washed, changed his clothes, and then went forth to the café, a popular rendezvous which he had known when, six years before, he had served temporarily at the Brussels Legation.
It was a huge, square, open place, with walls tiled to represent various Bacchanalian pictures, and many tables, upon half of which were laid cloths for the déjeuner. Being winter there were only a dozen tables set on the pavement outside, but in summer there are a hundred spread over the broad footway, and in an evening the place, being a highly papular resort, is crowded to overflowing by the chattering, bearded Bruxellois and their female friends.
At that hour, however, the place was nearly empty as Hubert entered, his sharp eyes gazing around. Then suddenly he saw a youngish man in grey overcoat and wearing a Tyrolese hat of dark green plush, seated in a far corner.