idea tempted her, though she
hardly felt friendly enough yet with Lady Dauntrey to accept two
invitations from her at once. "It sounds interesting."

"It will be. Do say yes. I shall love to chaperon you."

They were at the steps of the Hotel de Paris.

"Then I say 'yes,'" answered Mary, "and thank you!"

In a few minutes it was all arranged. And Lady Dauntrey bade Miss Grant
goodbye, gayly, calling her a "mascotte." She turned the corner as if to
go to the shop of the hats. But there was no hat there which she
particularly wanted. She had merely sought an excuse to walk as far as
the Hotel de Paris with Mary. When the girl had disappeared behind the
glass doors, Eve went back quickly to the Casino, where her husband was
playing. She could not bear to be long away from him when he was there.
It was agony not to know whether he had lost or won.

XV

After the aviation week Vanno Della Robbia still had the excuse of
waiting for Prince Angelo and his bride. It was as well therefore to be
at Monte Carlo as anywhere else in the neighbourhood of the villa they
would occupy at Cap Martin.

They had been detained in England by a "command" visit to royalty, but
would soon come to the Riviera. In a letter Angelo asked his younger
brother to go over to Cap Martin and look at the house, which Vanno did:
and prolonging his excursion to the ruined, historic convent on the Cap,
met Miss Grant strolling there with Jim Schuyler and Dick Carleton. He
passed near enough to hear that Schuyler was telling the legend of the
place: how the nuns played a joke on the men of Roquebrune, the
appointed guardians of their safety, by ringing the alarm bell to see if
the soldiers of the castle town on the hill would indeed turn out to the
rescue. How the very night after the men had run down in vain, the bell
pealed out again, and the guardians remained snugly in their beds, only
to hear next day that this time the alarm had been real. Saracens had
sacked the convent, carried off all the young and pretty nuns, and
murdered the old ones.

Schuyler and Carleton both bowed to Vanno, whom they had met several
times during the "flying week" at Nice, and Schuyler interrupted his
story long enough to say to Mary, "That's Prince Giovanni Della Robbia,
who invented the parachute Rongier tested so successfully the other day.
Dick met him once in Egypt. He goes star-gazing in the desert, I
believe, consorting with Arabs, and learning all sorts