“Pretty, isn’t it?” I remarked indifferently, as we passed through some of the most fashionable streets.

“Yes, very pretty,” said the Boy.  “But what is there that one misses?  There’s something—­I’m not sure what.  Is it that the place looks huddled together?  You can’t see its face, for its features.  There are people like that.  You are introduced to them; you think them charming; yet when you’ve been away for a little while you couldn’t for your life recall the shape of their nose, or mouth, or eyes.  I feel it is going to be so with Aix, for me.”

The villa which the Contessa had taken for a few weeks before her annual flitting for Monte Carlo, was on the way to Marlioz, and we had been told exactly how to find it.  Still silent as to my ultimate intentions, I tramped along with the Boy beside me, Joseph and Innocentina bringing up the rear.  We would know the villa from the description we had been given, and having passed out of the town, we presently saw it; a little dun-coloured house, standing up slender and graceful among trees, like a charming grey rabbit on the watch by its hidden warren in the woods.

“I’m tired, aren’t you?” asked the Boy.  “I shall be glad to rest.”

Now was my time.  “I shan’t be able to rest quite yet,” said I, with a careless air.  “I shall see you in, say ‘How-de-do’ to the Contessa, and then I must be off to the hotel where I used to stop.  I remember it as delightful.”

“Why,” exclaimed the Boy blankly, “but I thought—­I thought we were going to stay with the Contessa!”

“You are, but I’m not,” I explained calmly.  “My friends the Winstons may very likely turn up at the same hotel” (this was true on the principle that anything, no matter how unexpected, may happen); “and if they should, I’d want to be on the spot to give them a welcome.  I wouldn’t miss them for the world.”

“The Contessa will be disappointed,” said the Boy slowly.

“Oh no, I don’t think so; and if she is, a little, you will easily console her.”

“If I had dreamed that you wouldn’t——­” The Boy began his sentence hastily, then cut it as quickly short.

I opened the gate.  We passed in together, Joseph remaining outside according to my directions, keeping Fanny-anny as well as Finois, while Innocentina followed the Boy with the pack-donkey.

A turn in the path brought us suddenly upon a lawn, surrounded with shrubbery which at first had hidden it from our view.  There, under a huge crimson umbrella, rising flowerlike by its long slender stem from the smooth-shaven grass, sat four persons in basket chairs, round a small tea table.  Gaeta, in green as pale as Undine’s draperies, sprang up with a glad little cry to greet us.  The Baron and Baronessa smiled bleak “society smiles,” and a handsome, fair young man frankly glared.

Evidently this was the great Paolo, master of the air and ships that sail therein; and as evidently he had heard of us.