Last night, when she had arrived back at the Hotel, her dress dishevelled and torn, her arms scratched, her hair falling over her shoulders but her eyes alight with a happiness which seemed to radiate from her, Aunt Emilie had been in the sitting room. Mistral was too excited, too thrilled by the echo of Robert’s voice still in her ears, to wonder then why Aunt Emilie had not sent the Police in search of her or at least had seemed perturbed and anxious about her absence.

Instead, Emilie was sitting slumped in a chair in an attitude that was almost one of collapse. She looked up as Mistral entered and it seemed as if for a moment she could hardly believe that her presence was real. Then slowly she sat forward in her chair. Her face was white and drawn and there were dark shadows under her eyes. At length she said in a low voice which had somehow a note of defeat in it,

‘So you have come back!’

‘Yes, I have come back, Aunt Emilie,’ Mistral replied.

‘And the Rajah?’ Emilie asked, still in that strange listless tone.

‘It was the Rajah who kidnapped me,’ Mistral answered. ‘The carriage took me to his Villa. There he – Oh, I cannot repeat what happened or what he said, but I managed to escape. I climbed out of the window and down the side of the Villa, and when at the last moment the Rajah would have sent his servants to bring me back, the Prince rescued me.’

The Prince!’

Emilie sat bolt upright, her voice regaining its elasticity.

‘Yes, the Prince!’ Mistral repeated. ‘He guessed that it was the Rajah’s carriage in which I had been driven away from the Restaurant. He arrived at the gates of the Villa just at the right moment. If he had not come – I do not know what might have – happened.’

She shuddered. The events of the night had been so strange and so complicated, following swiftly one upon another, that not until this moment had she begun to think clearly of the fate which would have awaited her had not the Prince arrived in the very nick of time.

Emilie jumped to her feet.

‘The Prince!’ she exclaimed. ‘The Prince! This is splendid, splendid! Nothing could be better!’

Mistral opened her lips to continue her story, to tell her aunt how the Prince had taken her to his Villa and bound up her hand, how Sir Robert had found her there and had jumped to entirely the wrong conclusion, how he had duelled with the Prince and had carried her off unconscious.