Nolan met him at the door of Brown’s Hotel with an anxious countenance.

“Their Royal Highnesses have gone, sir,” he said.  “But I’ve packed your trunks and sent them to the station.  Shall I follow them sir?”

“Yes,” said Carlton.  “Follow the trunks and follow the Hohenwalds.  I will come over on the Club train at four.  Meet me at the station, and tell me to what hotel they have gone.  Wait; if I miss you, you can find me at the Hotel Continental; but if they go straight on through Paris, you go with them, and telegraph me here and to the Continental.  Telegraph at every station, so I can keep track of you.  Have you enough money?”

“I have, sir—­enough for a long trip, sir.”

“Well, you’ll need it,” said Carlton, grimly.  “This is going to be a long trip.  It is twenty minutes to eleven now; you will have to hurry.  Have you paid my bill here?”

“I have, sir,” said Nolan.

“Then get off, and don’t lose sight of those people again.”

Carlton attended to several matters of business, and then lunched with Mrs. Downs and her niece.  He had grown to like them very much, and was sorry to lose sight of them, but consoled himself by thinking he would see them a few days at least in Paris.  He judged that he would be there for some time, as he did not think the Princess Aline and her sisters would pass through that city without stopping to visit the shops on the Rue de la Paix.

“All women are not princesses,” he argued, “but all princesses are women.”

“We will be in Paris on Wednesday,” Mrs. Downs told him.  “The Orient Express leaves there twice a week, on Mondays and Thursdays, and we have taken an apartment for next Thursday, and will go right on to Constantinople.”

“But I thought you said you had to buy a lot of clothes there?” Carlton expostulated.

Mrs. Downs said that they would do that on their way home.

Nolan met Carlton at the station, and told him that he had followed the Hohenwalds to the Hotel Meurice.  “There is the Duke, sir, and the three Princesses,” Nolan said, “and there are two German gentlemen acting as equerries, and an English captain, a sort of A.D.C. to the Duke, and two elderly ladies, and eight servants.  They travel very simple, sir, and their people are in undress livery.  Brown and red, sir.”

Carlton pretended not to listen to this.  He had begun to doubt but that Nolan’s zeal would lead him into some indiscretion, and would end disastrously to himself.  He spent the evening alone in front of the Cafe de la Paix, pleasantly occupied in watching the life and movement of that great meeting of the highways.  It did not seem possible that he had ever been away.  It was as though he had picked up a book and opened it at the page and place at which he had left off reading it a moment before.  There was the same type, the same plot, and the same characters, who were doing the same characteristic