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Count Bindo, the nonchalant, audacious cosmopolitan, who spent money so freely, was a veritable marvel of cleverness and cunning in all matters of chicanery and fraud. He was evidently a man who, though still young, had a pretty dark record. But what it really was he carefully concealed from me.
"Then the affair is far more complicated than I believed," exclaimed my companion, knitting his brows thoughtfully. "I wonder " "Wonder what?" "I wonder if Bindo knows this? Have you told him?" "No. It was after he had left." "Then we ought to let him know at once. Where is Regnier staying?" "At the Hermitage, as usual." "H'm." "Anybody with him?" "Nobody we know." "Have you spoken to Pierrette?"
To cross the Alps by the Col di Tenda and the tunnel would, I knew, take about six hours from Nice by way of Sospel. The despatch was sent from Milan, from which I guessed that for some reason Bindo was about to enter France by the back door, namely, by the almost unguarded frontier at Tenda.
"I own I was entirely misled in the beginning. That little girl played a trick on me. She's evidently not the ingenuous miss that I took her to be." "You mean Pierrette?" I laughed. "No, I quite agree with you. She's been to Monte Carlo before, I believe." "Well," exclaimed the debonnair Bindo, "I met her in London, as you know.
Had she deceived me when she told me that she was the daughter of old Dumont the jeweller? If so, then I had sent Bindo back to London on a wild goose-chase. We passed back into the roulette rooms, and for quite a long time she stood at the first table at the left of the entrance, watching the game intently. A man I knew passed, and I crossed to chat with him.
The country inns in which I had spent the past two nights had been filthy places, where the stoves had been surrounded by evil-smelling peasantry, where the food was uneatable, and where a wooden bench had served me as a bed. I was on my way to meet Bindo, who was to be the guest of a Russian countess in Ostrog. Whenever I mentioned my destination, the post-house keepers held up their hands.
Captain Otto Stolberg has, I hear, been transferred as attaché to another European capital. No doubt his first thoughts were of revenge, but on mature consideration he deemed it best to keep his mouth closed, or he would have betrayed himself as a spy. Bindo had, no doubt, foreseen that. As for Valentine, she actually declares that, after all, she merely rendered a service to her country!
At the Métropole, in Brussels, we spent a welcome twenty-four hours, and slept most of the time. Then on again, still due North, first to Boxtel, in Holland, and then on to Utrecht. Until that day a week after leaving Monte Carlo on our rush across Europe Bindo practically preserved a complete silence as to his intentions or as to what had happened.
"I'll explain in the morning, when we've got rid of it all." He did explain. Blythe and Henderson both left us at Valence with the booty, while Bindo and myself, in the morning sunshine, went forward at an easy pace along the Lyons road. "The affair wanted just a little bit of delicate manoeuvring," he explained. "It was an affair of the heart, you see.
Suffice it to say that I duly arrived at the Great Eastern Hotel at Parkeston next morning, and registered there in the name of Parker. Then I waited in patience until, two days later, I received a note from Bindo, and met him at some distance from the hotel. His personal appearance was greatly altered, and he was shabbily dressed as a chauffeur.
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