Just then a sound from some one dining at a little table immediately behind her, something between a splutter, a cough, and a chuckle, made her turn sharply, with a gasp that began by being a suppressed cry, and look straight into the bearded, goggled face of that miserable Anarchist, whose sinister gaze fell before the fearless interrogation of hers. As she wrote afterwards to her husband, it was a very damaging feature in his character that this truculent creature could never look her straight in the face. "Then the woman of mystery can't be far off," she reflected, after recovering from the first shock of being pursued by this objectionable person to her remote mountain fastness. "But I leave the place to-morrow, if I have to ride down those rocks on a rhinoceros. He gives me the creeps, glowering at me behind those horrid goggles." Chapter VI Mountain Sunset Nobody seemed to know what was the exact position M. Isidore occupied in the hotel, nor, indeed, did anybody care, as long as he was civil and made himself generally useful. Yet there was a vague feeling of mystery associated with the light-hearted youth, who in some inexplicable way commanded a certain amount of deference that excluded familiarity. His name floated continually on the surface of general conversation. It was "Ask M. Isidore this--M. Isidore will see to that," or, "Where _is_ M. Isidore?" and the vivid face and dancing eyes were there. He had a habit of suddenly appearing without audible summons in crises of discomfort and perplexity, when, as if by magic, things came straight, and, with a jest and a shrug, he vanished--Heaven only knew whither, for he seemed to possess neither local habitation nor surname. You never knew where to look for him, yet he was always to be found. If donkeys from Mentone were wanted, he tapped and clicked in a little corner cupboard, and after one or two soft "Ola's!" listened as if in communion with subject spirits to whom he whispered words of power, whereupon, in no time to speak of, gaily-caparisoned but self-willed animals, in charge of women in flat straw hats, stood waiting on a little sort of bastion on the ridge, outside the gate at the back of the house.