Nadia delivered the message with which she was charged from the landlord, and retired, and it was some time before she lighted on the meaning of this curiously disjointed sentence. It occurred to her at last, in one of those flashes of insight which sometimes present to the mind in a moment the solution of a mystery long pondered over in vain, that the adventures of Léonide and Erminie were merely a blind, and that when Madame O’Malachy was supposed by those who were set to watch her to be reading to her husband in French, she was in reality discussing with him the progress of their schemes. No thought of profiting by this discovery to penetrate into her parents’ plans occurred to Nadia, and in any case the idea of acting as a spy would have been abhorrent to her; but even had she been anxious to probe more deeply the mystery of M. X. and his employés, her father and mother kept their secrets as carefully concealed from her as from the Thracian police-agents themselves. If the subject of Thracia was mentioned when she was in their company, it was merely as the text of a bantering discourse, conducted with more or less of good-humour on the O’Malachy’s part, but punctuated with bitter reproaches on that of his wife. Neither of them could forgive Nadia for her folly in refusing Caerleon, when the acceptance of his proposal would have raised the whole family to affluence and distinction, although Madame O’Malachy resented much more strongly than her husband the loss of the material benefits promised by the match. His easy-going nature accepted serenely enough the change in the position of affairs, and the necessity of plotting against the man he had hoped to welcome as a son-in-law; but both he and his wife were careful to guard against giving Nadia any inkling of the consequences which might ensue to Thracia and its king from her refusal. Although they never engaged in their mysterious work until she was out of the way, they would not run the risk of stimulating her curiosity by showing any eagerness to get rid of her, and allowed her to join them or not just as she pleased. But the certainty of finding herself either reproached or laughed at for the foolish way in which she had mismanaged what Madame O’Malachy called “_l’affaire Carlino_” made her only anxious to shun their society; and during the first few days of their stay at Witska she roamed about the garden alone, finding nothing to do but to recall the past, and feeling that she had nothing in the whole world to which to look forward. This being the case, it is not surprising that she caught herself one day wishing that she had not forbidden Caerleon so absolutely ever to renew his suit, but the discovery shocked and horrified her extremely.