young woman who, in passing, saluted my companion with deep respect. It was Rosalie.

“She’s wandering here alone, and watching for me to re-enter the hotel,” remarked Valentine. “But she need not follow me like this, I think.”

“No,” I said. “Somehow, I don’t like that girl.”

“Why not? She’s all right. What more natural than that she should be on the spot to receive me when I come in?”

“But you don’t want to be spied upon like this, surely!” I said resentfully. “Have you done anything to arouse her suspicions that you are not—well, not exactly what you pretend yourself to be?”

“Nothing whatever; I have been a model of discretion. She never went to the Avenue Kléber. I was staying for two nights at the Grand—under my present title—and after engaging her I told her that the house in the Avenue des Champs Elysées was in the hands of decorators.”

“Well, I don’t half like her following us. She may have overheard something of what we’ve just been saying—who knows?”

“Rubbish! Ah! mon cher ami, you are always scenting danger where there is none.”

I merely shrugged my shoulders, but my opinion remained. There was something mysterious about Rosalie—what it was I could not make out.

At ten o’clock next morning Her Highness met me [Pg 73]in the big marble hall of the hotel dressed in the smartest motor-clothes, with a silk dust-coat and the latest invention in veils—pale blue with long ends twisted several times around her throat. Even in that costume she looked dainty and extremely charming.

[Pg 73]

I, too, was altered in a manner that certainly disguised my true calling; and when I brought the car round to the front steps, quite a crowd of visitors gathered to see her climb to the seat beside me, wrap the rug around her skirts, and start away.

With a deep blast on the electric horn I swept out of the hotel grounds to the left, and a few moments later we were heading away along the broad sea-road through the pretty villages of Ardenza and Antignano, out into that wild open country that lies between Leghorn and the wide deadly marshes of the fever-stricken Maremma. The road we were travelling was the old road to Rome, for two hundred miles along it—a desolate, dreary, and uninhabited way—lay the Eternal City. Over that self-same road on 

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