"I was educated at Harvard," said the duke. "My mother was an American, the daughter of the consul at San Remo."
"I knew you were a regular guy!" said Peaches, and then blushed furiously. The duke laughed.
"Thanks!" said he. "But I am an Italian, you know, really, and I love my country--as perhaps few men have!"
His eyes grew grave as he spoke. And after a few moments of curious silence that fell upon us unwittingly, he held up his hand as a signal to stop.
"We are coming into Deux Arbres now," he said. "There is the inn, and that trap looks as if it would take one to the château! I am a thousand times grateful for the lift!"
The car slowed down at Alicia's command, and the duke, despite our protests, insisted upon getting out.
"We could easily take you right to the ranch house--castle, that is!" Peaches offered.
"Not a bit more trouble, young man!" said Mr. Pegg.
But the duke would have no more of us. Charmingly, politely and firmly he shook us, as Alicia put it afterward. He disappeared within a little hostelry and we resumed our journey. When we had done so Alicia's father subjected her to a cross examination which I, rather than she, deserved, inasmuch as I had really been responsible for the more or less shocking performance. But Peaches nobly refrained from in any way implicating me.
"Look here, Peaches, what made you collect that young swell?" said her parent in an attempt to be properly irate.
"Why, pa, I thought it was Jake Keeting--you know, Giant Jake from the B-2 outfit, and I was so surprised I yelled before I thought," she lied with alarmingly casual promptness.
"Well, it's a good thing I and Miss Talbot was along to make it look respectable!" he boomed. "This isn't the coast, you know, and people round here have old-fashioned notions. But he seemed a mighty nice young feller."
Alicia glanced sideways at Richard, the chauffeur.
"I thought he was a wonder!" she said deliberately. And then no more.
That night, in the luxurious bedroom at the Ritz in Paris, which was precisely like all the other hotels at which we had stopped so far, Peaches and I discussed the mystery of the Ducca di Monteventi to our heart's content. And in the end we tacitly cleared him of connection with the incident of the London theater, Alicia insisting that I must have been mistaken in my identification of him, and I determinedly convinced that he was none other than the hero of my escapade, an opinion to which I privately held, though I refrained from expressing it when I discovered that she disliked the thought.