The newcomer was an American!

CHAPTER IX

THE ENEMY

“I’ve sighted the Enemy,” exclaimed Bobby Browne, coming up from Neptune’s Pool—­the largest of the fountains.  His wife and Lady Deppingham were sitting in the cool retreat under the hanging garden.  “Would you care to have a peek at him?”

“I should think so,” said his wife, jumping to her feet.  “He’s been on the island three days, and we haven’t had a glimpse of him.  Come along, Lady Deppingham.”

Lady Deppingham arose reluctantly, stifling a yawn.

“I’m so frightfully lazy, my dear,” she sighed.  “But,” with a slight acceleration of speech, “anything in the shape of diversion is worth the effort, I’m sure.  Where is he?”

They had come to call the new American lawyer “The Enemy.”  No one knew his name, or cared to know it, for that matter.  Bowles, in answer to the telephone inquiries of Saunders, said that the new solicitor had taken temporary quarters above the bank and was in hourly consultation with Von Blitz, Rasula and others.  Much of his time was spent at the mines.  Later on, it was commonly reported, he was to take up his residence in Wyckholme’s deserted bungalow, far up on the mountain side, in plain view from the chateau.

Life at the chateau had not been allowed to drag.  The Deppinghams and the Brownes confessed in the privacy of their chambers that there was scant diplomacy in their “carryings-on,” but without these indulgences the days and nights would have been intolerable.

The white servants had become good friends, despite the natural disdain that the trained English expert feels for the unpolished American domestic.  Antipathies were overlooked in the eager strife for companionship; the fact that one of Mrs. Browne’s maids was of Irish extraction and the other a rosy Swede may have had something to do with their admission into the exclusive set below stairs, but that is outside the question.  If the Suffolk maids felt any hesitancy about accepting the hybrid combination as their equals, it was never manifested by word or deed.  Even the astute Antoine, who had lived long in the boulevards of Paris, and who therefore knew an American when he saw one at any distance or at any price, evinced no uncertainty in proclaiming them Americans.

Miss Pelham, the stenographer from West Twenty-third Street, might have been included in the circle from the first had not her dignity stood in the way.  For six days she held resolutely aloof from everything except her notebook and her machine, but her stock of novels beginning to run low, and the prospect of being bored to extinction for six months to come looming up before her, she concluded to wave the olive branch in the face of social ostracism, assuming a genial attitude of condescension, which was graciously overlooked by the others.  As she afterward said, there is