“We move down to Varna to-morrow, and then home by way of Constantinople,” she replied in French in answer to my question. “Aunt Mélanie has invited your Highness to our house in Toddington Terrace, she tells me. I do hope you will come. But send us a line first. In a month we shall be back again to the dreariness of the Terrace.”
“Dreariness? Then you are not fond of London?”
“No.” And her face fell, as though the metropolis contained for her some sad memory she would fain forget. Her life with that yellow-toothed, wizen-faced old aunt could not be fraught with very much pleasure, I reflected. “I much prefer travelling. Fortunately we are often abroad, for on all my aunt’s journeys I act as her companion.”
“You are, however, French—eh?”
“Yes—from Paris. But I know the Balkans well. We lived in Belgrade for a year—before the Servian coup d’état. I am very fond of the Servians.”
“And I also,” I declared, for I had been many times in Servia, and had many friends there.
They were a curious pair, and about them both was an indescribable air of mystery which I could not determine, but which caused me to decide to visit them at their London home, the address of which I had already noted.
At five o’clock that evening I took farewell of both Madams and her dainty little niece, and by midnight was in the Roumanian capital. My business—which by the way concerned the obtaining of a little matter of 20,000 francs from an unsuspecting French wine merchant—occupied me about a week and afterwards I went north to Klausenburg, in Hungary, and afterwards to Budapest, Graz, and other places.
Contrary to my expectations, my affairs occupied me much longer than I expected, and four months later I found myself still abroad, at the fine Hôtel Stefanie, among the beautiful woods of evergreen laurel at Abbazia, on the Gulf of Quarnero. My friend, the Rev. Thomas Clayton from Bayswater, was staying there, and as, on the evening of my arrival, we were seated together at dinner I saw, to my great surprise, Madame Demidoff enter with the pretty Elise, accompanied by a tall, fair-haired gentlemanly young man, rather foppishly dressed.
“Hulloa?” I exclaimed to my friend, “there’s somebody I know! That old woman is Madame Demidoff.”