uptly to join a personage in a
red fez and mounted on a white horse; and then, some time afterwards, the
vexed Mr. Blunt and his indiscreet mother (though I really couldn't see
where the harm was) had one more chance of a good stare. The third party
that time was the Royal Pretender (Allegre had been painting his portrait
lately), whose hearty, sonorous laugh was heard long before the mounted
trio came riding very slowly abreast of the Blunts. There was colour in
the girl's face. She was not laughing. Her expression was serious and
her eyes thoughtfully downcast. Blunt admitted that on that occasion the
charm, brilliance, and force of her personality was adequately framed
between those magnificently mounted, paladin-like attendants, one older
than the other but the two composing together admirably in the different
stages of their manhood. Mr. Blunt had never before seen Henry Allegre
so close. Allegre was riding nearest to the path on which Blunt was
dutifully giving his arm to his mother (they had got out of their fiacre)
and wondering if that confounded fellow would have the impudence to take
off his hat. But he did not. Perhaps he didn't notice. Allegre was not
a man of wandering glances. There were silver hairs in his beard but he
looked as solid as a statue. Less than three months afterwards he was
gone.

"What was it?" asked Mills, who had not changed his pose for a very long
time.

"Oh, an accident. But he lingered. They were on their way to Corsica.
A yearly pilgrimage. Sentimental perhaps. It was to Corsica that he
carried her off--I mean first of all."

There was the slightest contraction of Mr. Blunt's facial muscles. Very
slight; but I, staring at the narrator after the manner of all simple
souls, noticed it; the twitch of a pain which surely must have been
mental. There was also a suggestion of effort before he went on: "I
suppose you know how he got hold of her?" in a tone of ease which was
astonishingly ill-assumed for such a worldly, self-controlled,
drawing-room person.

Mills changed his attitude to look at him fixedly for a moment. Then he
leaned back in his chair and with interest--I don't mean curiosity, I
mean interest: "Does anybody know besides the two parties concerned?" he
asked, with something as it were renewed (or was it refreshed?) in his
unmoved quietness. "I ask because one has never heard any tales. I
remember one evening in a restaurant seeing a man come in with