Both of them had travelled very extensively, and their knowledge of the Continent was practically as wide as my own. Both were, of course, much impressed by my princely position. It is marvellous what a title does, and how snobbish is the world in every quarter of the globe.
So interesting did I find the pair that I spent another day in Tirnovo, where, in the summer sunset, we were idling after dinner on the balcony overhanging the steep cliff above the river. Our salle-à-manger was half filled by rough, chattering peasants in their white linen clothes embroidered in red, and round pork-pie hats of fur, while our fare that night had been of the very plainest—and not over fresh at that.
But it was a distinctly curious incident to find, in that remotest corner of the Balkans, a lady whose residence was in the West End of London, and who, though a foreigner by birth, had evidently been educated “within the sound of Bow Bells.”
“I love Bulgaria,” the old lady had said to me as we had walked together down by the river bank that afternoon. “I bring Elise here every summer. Last June we were at Kazanlik, among the rose-fields, where they make the otto of rose. It was delightful.”
I replied that I, also, knew Servia, Bulgaria, and Roumania fairly well.
“Then your Highness is travelling for pleasure?” she inquired.
I smiled vaguely, for I did not satisfy her. She struck me as being a particularly inquisitive old busybody.
When next morning Mademoiselle Elise informed me that her aunt was suffering from a headache, I invited her to go for a stroll with me out of the town, to which she at once acceded.
Her smart conversation and natural neat waisted chic attracted me. She used “Ideale,” the very expensive Parisian perfume that to the cosmopolitan is somehow the hall-mark of up-to-date smartness. Her gown was well-cut, her gloves fresh and clean, and her hat a small toque of the very latest mode.
Idling beside her in the bright sunshine, with the broad river hundreds of feet below, and the high blue Balkans on every side about us, I spent a most delightful morning.