She looked up at him and smiled.

“I think nothing about you will surprise me—­you are so many-sided and—­if you will pardon me saying it—­so different from what one imagines men of—­of your calling to be,” she said; and laughed a little, colouring divinely until her face was like the roses themselves.  “You treat me as if I were a queen; and I am not used to Court manners.  Where, if you please, did you acquire yours?”

“In the vast Kingdom of the World,” he made answer, with just a momentary change of countenance—­a mere suspicion of embarrassment:  laughed off before she could be quite sure that it had had any real existence.  “Please remember that to appear to be what one is not, and to ape manners foreign to one’s real self is part of what you have so nicely, so euphemistically, termed ‘my calling.’  I am an Actor on the World’s Stage, Miss Lorne; I should be but a very poor one if I could not accommodate myself to many roles.”

“If you play them all so well as you do that of the preux chevalier, it is no wonder you are a success,” she replied gaily, slipping thus into easy conversation with him.

And so it fell out that the magazines and the illustrated papers were not so much of a boon as both had fancied they might be when Cleek brought them to her; for they had not even been opened when the train ran up to the quay side at Calais and brought them almost abreast of the channel steamer.

CHAPTER XI

It was not until they were aboard the boat and the shores of France were slipping off into the distance that Miss Lorne saw anything at all of Dollops.  As he had travelled down from Paris to Calais in a separate compartment there had been no opportunity to do so.  He had, too, held himself respectfully aloof even after they had boarded the steamer; and, but that once, when a lurch of the vessel had unexpectedly disturbed Cleek’s equilibrium and knocked his hat off, she might not have seen him even then.

But the manner in which he pounced upon that hat, the tender care with which he brushed it, and the affectionate interest in both voice and eyes when he handed it back and inquired eagerly, “Didn’t hurt yourself, Gov’nor, did you, sir?” compelled her to take notice of him, and, in doing so, to understand the position in which they stood to each other.

“You are travelling with a servant?” she enquired.

“More than a servant—­a devoted henchman, Miss Lorne.  They say you can’t purchase fidelity for all the money in the world, but I secured the finest brand of it in the Universe by the simple outlay of two half crowns.  It is the boy of that night on Hampstead Heath—­the boy who stood at the turning point.  The Devil didn’t get him, you see.  He kept his promise and has been walking the straight road ever since.”

She turned round and looked at him; realizing more of the man’s character in that moment than a hundred deeds of bravery, a thousand acts of gentle courtesy, could ever have made her understand.