"Here we are!" she said, and flung open the door of the car just as we started to move. The young man sprang forward, threw in his bags, slipped into the extra seat, slammed the door, and Peaches touched Richard upon the shoulder.
"Drive for your life!" she shouted, and the big black car shot down the street just as the two pursuers emerged, breathless, from the crowd.
The young man whom Alicia had hailed turned toward her with quite the nicest smile it had ever been my fortune to behold, a smile in which his white teeth, which were of a character to do any dentist credit, were the least important factor, beautiful as they were. It was the way his face lighted up which caught one. In any situation that smile would prove his shield and buckler. It would have been invaluable to a book agent, and a missionary would have needed no other credentials--at least certainly not on our street at home. We all smiled back at him instinctively, though it was to Alicia that he spoke.
"It was simply ripping of you people!" he said in excellent English and a delightfully modulated voice, yet with a curious intonation, as if it were not his native tongue.
"Not at all!" replied Peaches, her eyes holding his. "Glad to oblige you!"
"I didn't expect you to be here," he went on. "But I think it's awfully jolly. I suppose you motor a great deal, Lady Gordon!"
"Lady who?" gasped Peaches. "Gee-whiz! Who do you think we are?"
"Great Scott!" said the inadvertent guest. "Aren't you Lord and Lady Gordon?"
"Lord and Lady me eye!" remarked Peaches. "We are not!"
"Then why on earth did you call to me?" exclaimed the young man. "And who are you?"
Just then the Citrus King leaned forward and shouted a query against the wind.
"Who is your young man, Peaches?" he said. "Make me acquainted."
"I don't know who he is!" snapped his daughter. "Who are you yourself?" she demanded of him. "I am a low-life American bourgeois in trade and every bally thing--name of Alicia Pegg; and this is my father, Pinto Pegg, the Citrus King, and this is my chaperon, Miss Talbot, that I'm taking abroad to educate. Now who are you?"
"My name is Sandro di Monteventi," he said, getting out a little gold cardcase, from which he extricated a visiting card bearing a five-pointed coronet and the inscription Monteventi. A duke! As I glimpsed the card, which with proper breeding he handed first to me, I nearly fainted. We must have made a mistake somehow. Yet he was undoubtedly the young man of the theater. I could not have made so monstrous an error. As for Peaches, when I handed it on to her she simply gave a frank stare and a long whistle.