CHAPTER XXV
AT THE CAFÉ DE PARIS
It was in the early days of January—damp and foggy in England.
Walter Fetherston sat idling on the terrasse of the Café de Paris in Monte Carlo sipping a "mazagran," basking in the afternoon sunshine, and listening to the music of the Rumanian Orchestra.
Around him everywhere was the gay cosmopolitan world of the tables—that giddy little after-the-war financier and profiteer world which amuses itself on the Côte d'Azur, and in which he was such a well-known figure.
So many successive seasons had he passed there before 1914 that across at the rooms the attendants and croupiers knew him as an habitué, and he was always granted the carte blanche—the white card of the professional gambler. With nearly half the people he met he had a nodding acquaintance, for friendships are easily formed over the tapis vert—and as easily dropped.
Preferring the fresher air of Nice, he made his headquarters at the Hôtel Royal on the world-famed promenade, and came over to "Monte" daily by the rapide.
Much had occurred since that autumn morning when he had stood with Herbert Trendall in the big room at New Scotland Yard, much that had puzzled him, much that had held him in fear lest the ghastly truth concerning Sir Hugh should be revealed.