He watched his noble guests depart without regret, then sat down to write a hurried line to Jill, full of heart-felt sympathy. He wondered--not without a smile--if Countess Marco Viviani would go to prison for Bellanti--like Mrs. Uniacke for the Cause!
He signed the page "Peter McTaggart," with an amused breath of relief. He liked it better than "Maramonte" for all its air of high romance.
And, as he drew a steady line under the purely British name, unconsciously he made his choice and ran up the Union Jack!
But as he neared the mist-wreathed cliffs of Dover McTaggart's patriotism was put to the test by the captious weather and the hopeless, sea-sick crowd around him. Rain and hail and distant thunder were his portion, a choppy sea and a boat packed with a draggled party from the Polytechnic, returning home.
He said to himself he had never seen his countrymen to worse advantage. Beside them, Mario, chilled to the bone but still cheerful, inured to the motion by many a past yachting trip, looked a perfect aristocrat from his well-poised head to his slender feet.
A woman, their neighbour on the boat, lost her hat, then her rug, wailing aloud, and Mario, at his master's nod, retrieved them imperturbably from the skittish antics of the wind.
The sufferer never even thanked him, but clutched her belongings with a glance full of mistrust, recognizing a foreigner--or, in other words--a doubtful character!
At last they bumped against the pier; ropes whirled out, gangways creaked; a mad herd of humans crushed after porters, charging with hoisted bags.
The train looked absurdly small. McTaggart thought the station shrunk and his first English cup of tea was cold and strong, in a leaking pot.
Even the fields, as they left the Downs, seemed to have dwindled to half their size. The rain lashed against the glass. Between the streams trickling down he began to catch green vistas of hops with their quaint, peaked oast-houses like the caps worn by hob-goblins from the pages of a fairy book.
Rochester!--under leaden skies, smoky, blurred. The train rocked on, the shorter gauge oddly aggressive in the low-built, narrow carriage.
Then, at last, Charing Cross; the endless wait for the luggage and the final crowning disenchantment--no taxis!--due to "the strike."