“Ah, Waldron, but you’re a diplomat, you know!” replied the younger man. “You fellows always say the right thing in the right place. We chaps in the Service, however, have a habit of speaking bluntly, I fear.”
“It is just as easy to be diplomatic, my dear Chester, as to be indiscreet,” replied the Honourable Hubert Waldron, M.V.O., who was second secretary at His Britannic Majesty’s Embassy at Madrid, and was now on leave for a winter holiday.
Not yet forty, a smart, well-groomed, athletic, clean-cut Englishman, he nevertheless possessed the distinct Foreign Office air, and was, at the same time, a cosmopolitan of cosmopolitans. Essentially a ladies’ man, as every good diplomat should be, he was, in addition, decidedly handsome, with pale, refined features, a strong face with straight nose, a pair of dark, deep-set, thoughtful eyes, and a dark, well-trained moustache.
At Court functions, balls, receptions, official dinners and such-like festivities when, with his colleague, he was bound to be on show in his perfect-fitting diplomatic uniform, women always singled him out as a striking figure, as, indeed, he was, and at Stockholm, Brussels, and Lima, where he had respectively served as attaché he had attained great popularity among the corps diplomatique, and the gay, giddy world of Society which, in every capital, revolves about it.
The quartette had made each other’s acquaintance since leaving Cairo, having found themselves fellow-passengers on board the fine new river-steamer, the Arabia—members of a smart party of wealthy idlers which included two of America’s most famous millionaires. The party numbered thirty, all told, and during the three weeks they had travelled together and had all spent a time which each declared to be the most delightful of their lives.
The younger Englishman was Chester Dawson, son of Sir Forbes Dawson, M.P., and a lieutenant in the 19th Hussars, who, like Waldron, was on leave, while of the two ladies the younger was French, though she spoke English perfectly, and the other, ten years her senior, was slightly angular and decidedly English.
Mademoiselle Lola Duprez had attracted Hubert Waldron from the first moment when they had met on the upper deck an hour after leaving Cairo. She was bright, vivacious, and extremely chic, possessing all the daintiness of the true Parisienne without her irritating mannerisms. Slightly petite, with an extremely pretty and refined face, big eyes, a perfect complexion and a slim, erect figure, she was—judged from the standpoint of a connoisseur of female beauty as Hubert Waldron undoubtedly was—unusually beautiful and attractive. On many of the excursions into the desert when the party had landed to visit the ancient monuments, the pyramid of Sakkâra, the Tomb of Thi, the temples of Abydos Denderah and the rest, Hubert had ridden a donkey at her side, or spent the long, idle, sunny afternoon hours on deck, lolling in the padded cane-chairs sipping coffee and gossiping as the steamer, with its Arab reis or pilot squatting in the bow smoking cigarettes, made her way up the broad stream.
Thus, in the three delightfully lazy weeks which had gone, they had become most excellent friends, while Chester Dawson had, with all the irresponsibility of the young cavalry officer, admired a striking go-ahead American girl named Edna Eastham who, with her father, had come from Chelsea, Massachusetts. Mother, father, and daughter were a loud-speaking, hard-faced trio who bought all the false antiques offered to them by Arab pedlars.
Mademoiselle’s companion, a Miss Gabrielle Lambert, was a woman of quite a different stamp. She was nearly thirty, with a rather sad, thoughtful face, but unmistakably a lady by birth and breeding, half English, half French, though she never spoke much of herself. Travelling with the two girls was an old and peculiarly shrewd grey-haired Frenchman, an uncle of mademoiselle named Jules Gigleux, a good type of the dandified though elderly Parisian, yet to Hubert—a student of men—he was from the first something of a mystery.
Ahmed, the silent dignified servant with the face of bronze, handed mademoiselle a small plate of bon-bons. She took one, and then turning to the diplomat, exclaimed in her pretty broken English: