"I used to be a caddie," Trent lied glibly. "Who plays there?"
"The count because his doctor tells him to. I because I hate it, and Pauline that her figure may remain seductive. Thank God there are but nine holes! It encourages our master to have one man who always plays worse than he. Look, that is the castle."
Almost under the shadows of Mount Sljeme the rugged building lay. Around it, nestling at its gates were many other lesser stone buildings which Hentzi told him were stables, dwellings and out-houses. It was situated in the Zagorje or land beyond the hills and had, despite its fine gardens and the green turf of the links a forbidding air.
When the Lion was run into its garage Hentzi introduced the new chauffeur to the man with whom he was to live, a man who with his wife had one of the cottages outside the castle wall. Peter Sissek, the man, was unfriendly from the start. He resented the importation of a chauffeur with the new car as a slight to his own skill. But as he spoke only Croatian and Hungarian, and Trent understood neither tongue, his grievances were not voluble.
[Chapter Nine]
PAULINE
Anthony Trent met Pauline in rather a curious way. He had been a week at Castle Radna and had not been commanded to drive the count. Then Hentzi had informed him Count Michæl was sick of a bad cold. Sissek by virtue of being senior in the Temesvar service tried to get the new man to help him with his own cars but Trent absolutely declined.
He had assumed a certain post in order to carry out a design but his duties lay with the Lion car and he left the Croatian grumbling and set out for a tour of inspection. Naturally his steps led him to the little golf course a mile distant. There were no long holes and the course was hardly trapped at all. It was just the kind of place elderly men, who played a weak game, would revel in.