”‘Gone to Belgrade. We parted this morning, and I came here to you.’
”‘And your friend, Mehmed?’
”‘Bah! the yellow-faced fool!’ she cried impatiently with a quick snap of her white fingers. ‘He expects to meet me at the Court ball to-night!’
”‘And he will be disappointed!’ I added with a smile, at the same time reflecting that upon my passport already viséd for Constantinople—covered as it was, indeed, with visés for all the East—I could easily insert after my own name the words, ‘accompanied by his wife Louisa.’
“Besides, though I had several times been in the Sultan’s capital, I knew very few people there. So detection would not be probable.
“Olga saw my hesitation, and repeated her entreaty. She was, I saw, desperate. Yet though I pressed her to tell me the truth, she only answered:
”‘The police of Warsaw are in search of me because of the events of May last. Some day, when we know each other better, I will tell you my strange story. I escaped from the “Museum of Riga”’!”
“Pale to the lips, her chest rising and falling quickly, her blue eyes full of the terror of arrest and deportment to Poland she stood before me, placing her life in my hands.
“She had escaped from the ‘Museum of Riga,’ that prison the awful tortures of which had only recently been exposed in the Duma itself. She, frail looking, and beautiful had been a prisoner there.
“It wanted, I reflected, still eight days to the opening of the shooting which I was due to spend with friends in Scotland. Even if I returned by the roundabout route she suggested I should be able to get up north in time.