Page:Alice Stuyvesant - The Vanity Box.djvu/217

 the proprietor of the hotel and the man who had brought his guests from Chamounix. This was odd, for if the fellow really came from St. Pierre de Chartreuse, he would almost certainly have been sent by the hotel at which Miss Ricardo meant to stay.

When the two dressing-bags and suitcases had been carried into the hotel, the young man still stood by the horses' heads. On the wide balcony at the top of the steps Miss Ricardo and Nora Verney consulted together for a moment in low voices. Then Miss Ricardo took an envelope out of her guide book, and gave it to Miss Verney, who ran down with it to the driver. She put it in his hand, and said a few words to him with an appearance of earnestness. Then he touched his hat (which Michel had never seen him remove), mounted to the box of his vehicle and drove off.

Meanwhile the detective had descended, without waiting for the first carriage to make the way clear. Having paid his coachman and seen his luggage carried up the steps by a porter, he reached the balcony himself just in time to witness a somewhat dramatic little scene, which he would not have missed for a great deal.

The two ladies, whom Michel admired extremely, were chatting with the landlord, a lesser personage having been sent to welcome the newcomer, when in the doorway appeared Sir Ian Hereward.

Michel had never seen Sir Ian in the flesh, but he had studied his features in many newspaper