“Oh! I don’t really know. Sometimes I feel so horribly apprehensive. Madame is always so discreet and so mysterious. She will never tell me anything; and you—you, Mr. Hargreave, you are the same,” she declared petulantly.
“I cannot, I regret, disclose to you facts of which I am ignorant,” I protested. “I am just as much in the dark concerning the actual object of our mission here as you are.”
“Do you think Madame knows anything of your mission here?” asked the girl.
“I don’t expect so. Your father is a very close and secretive man concerning his own business.”
“Ah! a mysterious business!” she exclaimed in a strange meaning voice. “Sometimes, Mr. Hargreave—sometimes I feel that it is not altogether an honest business.”
“Many brilliant pieces of business savor of dishonesty,” I remarked. “The successful business man cannot always, in these days of double-dealing chicanery and cut prices, act squarely, otherwise he is quickly left behind by his more shrewd competitors.”
And then I thought it wise to turn the subject of our conversation.
Salerno is only thirty miles from Naples, therefore I often traveled to the latter place—indeed, almost daily.
In Italian they have an old saying, “A chi veglia tutto si rivela” (“To him who remains watchful everything becomes revealed”). That had long been my motto. With Lola and Madame Duperré I was in Italy in order to learn what I could concerning the woman whom Fra Pacifico had so bitterly denounced.