“I’m very glad of that,” I answered her. “You know how greatly the affair annoyed the Emperor. You were awfully injudicious. It’s a good job that I chanced to meet you both at the station in Moscow.”
“Well,” she laughed, “I was going to England with him, and we had arranged to be married at a registrar’s office in London. Only you stopped us—you nasty old thing!”
“And you ought to be very glad that I recognised you just in the nick of time. Ten minutes later and you would have left Moscow. Think of the scandal—the elopement of a young Imperial Grand Duchess of Russia with an English commoner.”
“Well, and isn’t an English commoner as good, and perhaps better, than one of these uniformed and decorated Russian aristocrats? I am Russian,” she added frankly, “but I have no love for the Muscovite man.”
“It was a foolish escapade,” I declared; “but it’s all over now. The one consolation is that nobody knows the actual truth.”
“Except His Majesty. I told him everything; how I had met Geoffrey in Hampshire when I went to stay with Lady Hexworthy; how we used to meet in secret, and all that,” she said.
“Well now,” I exclaimed, looking straight into her face, “I want to ask you a plain open question. I have a motive in doing so—one which I will explain to you after you have answered me honestly and truthfully. I—”
“At it again!” cried the pretty madcap. “You’re really not yourself to-night, Uncle Colin. What is the matter with you?”
“Simply I want to know the truth—whether there is still any love between Geoffrey and yourself?”
“Ah! no,” she sighed, pulling a grimace. “It’s all over between us. It broke his heart, poor fellow, but some kind friend, at your Embassy, I think, wrote and told him about Paul Urusoff and—well, he wrote me a hasty letter. Then I replied, a couple of telegrams, and we agreed to be strangers for ever. And so ends the story. Like a novel, isn’t it?” she laughed merrily.