to face with the issue.



CHAPTER IX

THE BLACK BUTTERFLIES

The Turin-Paris express--the most direct, the Italians call it--was
too popular by half to suit the taste of morose beings who wished for
solitude. With great trouble and pains I had ferreted out a single
vacant compartment; but as four o'clock sounded and the whistle blew for
departure, a belated traveler joined me--worse still, an acquaintance
who could not be quite ignored.

The unwelcome intruder was Mr. John Van Blarcom, my late fellow-voyager,
and he accepted the encounter with a better grace than I.

"Why, hello!" he greeted me cheerfully. "Going through to France? Glad
to see you--but you're about the last man that I was looking for. I got
the idea somehow you were planning to stop a while in Rome."

I returned his nod with a curtness I was at no pains to dissemble. Then
I reproached myself, for it was undeniable that on the _Re d'Italia_ he
had more than once stood my friend. He had offered me a timely warning,
which I had flouted; he had obligingly confirmed my statement in my
grueling third degree. Yet despite this, or because of it, I didn't like
him; nor did I like his patronizing, complacent manner, which seemed
fairly to shriek at me, "I told you so!"