“It may be necessary to have someone near enough to the Palace in Puntal to insure immediate action—­action to be taken on the instant....  You must return to the city, Senor....  It will be for only a few days.  The Grand Palace Hotel is above the town in large gardens....  If you choose you can remain there with your presence absolutely unknown, so far as the city proper is concerned.  Also, the Marconi office has a station in the hotel grounds.  With a code which we have yet to arrange, I can keep in touch with you....”

The next day Benton was a passenger by steamer from Villefranche to Puntal.

The Grand Palace Hotel, dominating its own acres of subtropical gardens, looks down on the city as one seated on an eminence commands the common things at his feet.  Between its grounds and the scalloped bay, run the huddled habitations of the town’s water-front, with its delicately tinted walls and riotously colored gardens invading every crevice.

Following the semicircle of the bay, the eye commands that other eminence where the King’s Palace shuts itself in austerely at the very center of the arc.  Through the clustered, tea-sipping loungers on the galleries and terraces Benton made his way several days later, wearing the studiously affected unconcern of the tourist; an unconcern which he found it desperately difficult to assume in Puntal.

Driven by a growing and intense desire to put distance between himself and all alien humanity, he turned into a narrow, steeply climbing street which ran twisting between toy-houses and vine-cumbered garden-walls, until at last it lost its right to be called a street and became merely a narrow, trail-like path up the mountain-side.  The wanderer climbed interminably.  He took no thought of destination and satisfied himself with the physical exertion of the laborious going.

His heart pounded faster as he attained the altitude of the pine woods where he seemed to have left humanity behind him.  Once or twice he saw a shy, half-wild child who fled from its task of gathering fagots at his approach, to gaze at him out of startled eyes from a safe distance.

Occasionally he would stop to look down, from some coign of vantage, at cascading threads of water tumbling into the gorge below, or at a chalet-like house perched far beneath in its trim patch of agriculture.  Finally he stretched himself indolently on a carpet of pine needles at the brink of a drop to the valley.  Then, with a sense of recognition, he saw the tumbled-down gate of the King’s driveway below him to the left, and his face became set and miserable as memory began its work of tearing open wounds not yet old.

Suddenly there drifted up a chorus of children’s laughter.  He sat up suddenly and looked about, but no one was in sight.  Again he heard an unmistakable peal of shrill, childish merriment, seemingly close at hand.  He lay flat and looked over the ledge, holding on to a root of a gnarled pine that grew far out at the marge.