“Nothing whatever; I have been a model of discretion. She never went to the Avenue Kléber. I was staying for two nights at the Grand—under my present title—and after engaging her I told her that the house in the Avenue des Champs Elysées was in the hands of decorators.”
“Well, I don’t half like her following us. She may have overheard something of what we’ve just been saying—who knows?”
“Rubbish! Ah! mon cher ami, you are always scenting danger where there is none.”
I merely shrugged my shoulders, but my opinion remained. There was something mysterious about Rosalie—what it was I could not make out.
At ten o’clock next morning Her Highness met me in the big marble hall of the hotel dressed in the smartest motor-clothes, with a silk dust-coat and the latest invention in veils—pale blue with long ends twisted several times around her throat. Even in that costume she looked dainty and extremely charming.
I, too, was altered in a manner that certainly disguised my true calling; and when I brought the car round to the front steps, quite a crowd of visitors gathered to see her climb to the seat beside me, wrap the rug around her skirts, and start away.
With a deep blast on the electric horn I swept out of the hotel grounds to the left, and a few moments later we were heading away along the broad sea-road through the pretty villages of Ardenza and Antignano, out into that wild open country that lies between Leghorn and the wide deadly marshes of the fever-stricken Maremma. The road we were travelling was the old road to Rome, for two hundred miles along it—a desolate, dreary, and uninhabited way—lay the Eternal City. Over that self-same road on the top of the brown rocks the conquering Roman legions marched to Gaul, and war-chariots once ran where now sped motor-cars. Out there in those great solitudes through which we were passing nothing has changed since the days of Nero and of the Cæsars.
Twenty-five miles into the country we ran, and then pulled up to smoke and chat. She was fond of a cigarette, and joined me, laughing merrily at the manner in which we were so completely deceiving the gay world of Leghorn. The local papers that morning had announced that Her Highness the Princess Helen of Dornbach-Laxenburg, one of the most beautiful women in Europe, had “descended” at the Palace Hotel, and had been seen at Pancaldi’s later in the afternoon.
“As soon as I came down this morning I was pounced upon for information,” I explained. “A young Italian marquis, who has hitherto snubbed me, begged that I would tell him something concerning Her Highness. He is deeply smitten with your beauty, that’s very evident,” I laughed.
“My beauty! You are really incorrigible, M’sieur Ewart,” she answered reprovingly, as she blew the tobacco-smoke from her lips. “And what, pray, is the name of this admirer?”