’Henrietta Fakenham! no mistake about her; driving out from a pothouse; man beside her, military man; might be a German.  And, if you please, quite unacquainted with your humble servant, though we were as close as you to me.  Something went wrong in that pothouse.  Red eyes.  There had been a scene, one could swear.  Behind the lady another carriage, and her maid.  Never saw the girl before, and sets to bowing and smirking at me, as if I was the-fellow of all others!  Comical.  I made sure they were bound for this place.  They were on the Strasburg road.  No sign of them?’

‘You speak to me?’ said Fleetwood.

Potts muttered.  He had put his foot into it.

‘You have a bad habit of speaking to yourself,’ Fleetwood remarked, and left him.  He suffered from the rustics he had to deal with among his class, and it was not needed that he should thunder at them to make his wrath felt.

Livia swam in, asking:  ’What has come to Russett?  He passed me in one of his black fits.’

The tale of the Carlsruhe road was repeated by Potts.  She reproved him.  ’How could you choose Russett for such a report as that!  The admiral was on the road behind.  Henrietta—­you’re sure it was she?  German girls have much the same colouring.  The gentleman with her must have been one of the Court equerries.  They were driving to some chateau or battlefield the admiral wanted to inspect.  Good-looking man?  Military man?’

‘Oh! the man! pretty fair, I dare say,’ Potts rejoined.  ’If it wasn’t Henrietta Fakenham, I see with the back of my head.  German girl!  The maid was a German girl.’

‘That may well be,’ said Livia.

She conceived the news to be of sufficient importance for her to countermand the drive up the Lichtenthal, and take the Carlsruhe road instead; for Henrietta was weak, and Chillon Kirby an arch-plotter, and pleader too, one of the desperate lovers.  He was outstaying his leave of absence already, she believed; he had to be in England.  If he feared to lose Henrietta, he would not hesitate to carry her off.  Livia knew him, and knew the power of his pleading with a firmer woman than Henrietta.

CHAPTER XI

THE PRISONER OF HIS WORD

Nothing to rouse alarm was discovered at Carlsruhe.  Livia’s fair cousin was there with the red-haired gaunt girl of the mountains; and it was frankly stated by Henrietta, that she had accompanied the girl a certain distance along the Strasburg road, for her to see the last of her brother Chillon on his way to England.  Livia was not the woman to push inquiries.  On that subject, she merely said, as soon as they were alone together: 

‘You seem to have had the lion’s share of the parting.’

‘Yes, we passed Mr. Chumley Potts,’ was Henrietta’s immediate answer; and her reference to him disarmed Livia.

They smiled at his name transiently, but in agreement:  the tattler-spout of their set was, a fatal person to encounter, and each deemed the sudden apparition of him in the very early morning along the Carlsruhe road rather magical.