I stood in the roadway, hat in hand, as Italian etiquette requires.
“Ah! I am so pleased to meet you again,” she said in French. “I have much to tell you. Can you call on me—to-night at seven, if you have no prior engagement? We have the Villa Simoncini, in the Viale. Anyone will direct you to it. We cannot talk here.”
“I shall be delighted. I know the villa quite well,” was my answer; and then, with a smile, she drove on, and somehow I thought that the idlers watching us looked at me strangely.
At seven o’clock I was conducted through the great marble hall of the villa, one of the finest residences on the outskirts of Florence, and into the beautiful salon, upholstered in pale-green silk, where my pretty companion of that exciting run on the Great North Road rose to greet me with eager, outstretched hand; while behind her stood a tall, white-headed, military-looking man, whom she introduced as her father, General Stefanovitch.
“I asked you here for seven,” she said, with a sweet smile; “but we do not dine until eight, therefore we may talk. How fortunate we should meet to-day! I intended to write to you.”
I gathered from her subsequent conversation that we might speak frankly before her father, therefore I described to her the exciting adventure that had happened to me in Eccleston Street, whereupon she said—
“Ah! it is only to-day that I am able to reveal to you the truth, relying upon you not to make it public. The secret of the Latours must still be strictly kept, at all hazards.”
“What was their secret?” I inquired breathlessly.
“Listen, and I will tell you,” she said, motioning me to a seat and sinking into a low lounge-chair herself, while the General stood astride upon the bear-skin stretched before the English fire-grate. “Those men sought the life of one person only—the boy. They went to England to kill him.”