“Dear Sir,—
“I shall be glad if you can make it convenient to call at the Consulate this morning between eleven and one, as I desire to speak to you upon an important and most pressing matter.
“Yours faithfully,—
“John Hutchinson, His Majesty’s Consul.”
“Hutchinson,” he repeated to himself. “Is the Consul here called Hutchinson? It must be the Jack Hutchinson of whom Tristram spoke. He called him ‘jovial Jack Hutchinson.’ I wonder what’s the ‘pressing matter’? Some infernal worry, I suppose. Perhaps some dun or other in town has written to him for my address.”
He paused, his eyes fixed seriously upon the distant sea.
“No!” he exclaimed aloud at last. “His Majesty’s Consul must wait. I’ve promised to take Gemma driving this morning.”
Presently, when he had shaved, and assumed his suit of cool white ducks, the official letter again caught his eye, and he took it up.
“I suppose, after all, it’s only decent behaviour to go round and see what’s the matter,” he muttered aloud. “Yes, I’ll go, and drive with Gemma afterwards.”
Then he leisurely finished his toilet, strolled out into the Viale, and entering one of the little open cabs, was driven rapidly to the wide, handsome Piazza Vittorio Emanuele, where on the front of a great old galazzo at the further end were displayed a flagstaff surmounted by the English crown and an escutcheon of the British Royal arms. A tall, well-built, fierce moustached Italian concierge, who looked as if he might once have been an elegant gendarme of the Prince of Monaco, inquired his business, and took his card into an inner room on the right, the private office of the Consul.