close at that.' Of course I only have heard all this. I am much too
small a person, you understand, to even . . ."

He flashed his white teeth at us most agreeably, but the upper part of
his face, the shadowed setting of his eyes, and the slight drawing in of
his eyebrows gave a fatal suggestion. I thought suddenly of the
definition he applied to himself: "_Americain_, _catholique et
gentil-homme_" completed by that startling "I live by my sword" uttered
in a light drawing-room tone tinged by a flavour of mockery lighter even
than air.

He insisted to us that the first and only time he had seen Allegre a
little close was that morning in the Bois with his mother. His Majesty
(whom God preserve), then not even an active Pretender, flanked the girl,
still a girl, on the other side, the usual companion for a month past or
so. Allegre had suddenly taken it into his head to paint his portrait.
A sort of intimacy had sprung up. Mrs. Blunt's remark was that of the
two striking horsemen Allegre looked the more kingly.

"The son of a confounded millionaire soap-boiler," commented Mr. Blunt
through his clenched teeth. "A man absolutely without parentage.
Without a single relation in the world. Just a freak."

"That explains why he could leave all his fortune to her," said Mills.

"The will, I believe," said Mr. Blunt moodily, "was written on a half
sheet of paper, with his device of an Assyrian bull at the head. What
the devil did he mean by it? Anyway it was the last time that she
surveyed the world of men and women from the saddle. Less than three
months later. . ."

"Allegre died and. . . " murmured Mills in an interested manner.

"And she had to dismount," broke in Mr. Blunt grimly. "Dismount right
into the middle of it. Down to the very ground, you understand. I
suppose you can guess what that would mean. She didn't know what to do
with herself. She had never been on the ground. She . . . "

"Aha!" said Mills.

"Even eh! eh! if you like," retorted Mr. Blunt, in an unrefined tone,
that made me open my eyes, which were well opened before, still wider.

He turned to me with that horrible trick of his of commenting upon Mills
as though that quiet man whom I admired, whom I trusted, and for whom I
had already something resembling affection had been as much of a dummy as
that other one lurking in the shadows, pitiful and headless in its
attitude of alarmed chastity.

"Nothing escapes his penetration.