Your Highness will, no doubt, be surprised when I
inform you that this gentleman, so agile and so athletic, was no other
than Lord Vernon!"
CHAPTER VI
The Path Grows Crooked
In the sitting-room of apartment A, in the south wing of the Grand Hotel
Royal, Lord Vernon was tramping nervously up and down while his
companions regarded him with evident anxiety.
"I tell you fellows," he was saying, "it can't be kept up--I thought so
from the first, but all the rest of you seemed to think it would be so
infernally easy that I was ashamed to say anything. I knew something was
sure to happen to give us away, and something has happened. What was I
to do? Sit there like a mummy and allow that dog to frighten those girls
to death? What the deuce are you laughing at, Collins?"
"I'm laughing at your tragic tone. No, you couldn't have sat
still--though I don't suppose the young ladies were in any serious
danger. They were pretty, no doubt?"
"Ah!" said Vernon, with a mental smacking of the lips at the entrancing
picture the words called up.
"That, of course, made it doubly impossible to sit still. Did they know
you?"
"Oh, no; never saw me before; hadn't the slightest suspicion that they
were talking to such a famous personage. They said they were Americans."
"Then I don't see that any harm has been done.
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