"No. He won't know. I shall evade him as I've so often done before," replied His Imperial Highness. "I tell you of my intentions so that you may curb the activities of our most estimable friend. Tell him not to worry, and he will be paid a thousand marks on the day Count von Grünau reappears."
I smiled, for I saw the influence of the eternal feminine.
"No, Heltzendorff. You are quite mistaken," he said, reading my thoughts, and putting down his cigarette end. "There is no lady in this case. I am out here for secret purposes of my own. For that reason I take you into my confidence rather than that unnecessary inquiry should be made and some of those infernal journalists get hold of the fact that the Count von Grünau and the Crown-Prince are one and the same person. I was a fool to take this saloon. I ought to have travelled as an ordinary passenger, I know, but," he laughed, "this is really comfortable and, after all, what do we care what the world thinks—eh? Surely we can afford to laugh at it when all the honours of the game are already in our hands."
And at that moment we ran into the pretty, flower-decked station of San Remo, the place freshly painted for the attraction of the winter visitors who annually went south for sunshine.
His words mystified me, but I became even more mystified by his actions a few days later.
I was in ignorance that a fortnight before Hermann Hardt, one of His Highness's couriers, had left Potsdam and on arrival at Nice had rented for three months the fine Villa Lilas—the winter residence of the American millionaire leather merchant, James G. Jamieson, of Boston, who had gone yachting to Japan.
You know Nice, my dear Le Queux—you know it as well as I do, therefore you know the Villa Lilas, that big white mansion which faces the sea on Montboron, the hill road between the port of Nice and Villefranche. Half hidden among the mimosa, the palms, and grey-green olives, it is after the style of Mr. Gordon Bennett's villa at Beaulieu, with a big glass front and pretty verandas, with climbing geraniums flowering upon the terraces.
We soon settled there, for the household staff had arrived three days before, and on the evening of our arrival I accompanied the Crown-Prince down into the town to the Jetée promenade, the pier-pavilion where the gay cosmopolitan world disports itself to chatter, drink and gamble.
It was a glorious moonlit night, and "Willie," after strolling through the great gilded saloons, in one of which was a second-rate variety entertainment—the season not having yet commenced—went outside. We sat at the end of the pier smoking.
"Nice is dull as yet, is it not?" he remarked, for each year he always spent a month there incognito, the German newspapers announcing that he was away shooting. But "Willie," leading the gay life of the Imperial butterfly, much preferred the lively existence of the Côte d'Azur to the remote schloss in Thuringia or elsewhere.