is son
Frank was a really fine lad, curly-haired, sun-burnt and strenuous; but
nobody looked at him either. All eyes, as usual, were riveted, for
the moment at least, upon Ethel Harrogate, whose golden Greek head and
colour of the dawn seemed set purposely above that sapphire sea, like
a goddess's. The poet Muscari drew a deep breath as if he were drinking
something, as indeed he was. He was drinking the Classic; which his
fathers made. Ezza studied her with a gaze equally intense and far more
baffling.

Miss Harrogate was specially radiant and ready for conversation on this
occasion; and her family had fallen into the easier Continental habit,
allowing the stranger Muscari and even the courier Ezza to share their
table and their talk. In Ethel Harrogate conventionality crowned itself
with a perfection and splendour of its own. Proud of her father's
prosperity, fond of fashionable pleasures, a fond daughter but an arrant
flirt, she was all these things with a sort of golden good-nature that
made her very pride pleasing and her worldly respectability a fresh and
hearty thing.

They were in an eddy of excitement about some alleged peril in the
mountain path they were to attempt that week. The danger was not from
rock and avalanche, but from something yet more romantic. Ethel had
been earnestly assured that brigands, the true cut-throats of the modern
legend, still haunted that ridge and held that pass of the Apennines.

"They say," she cried, with the awful relish of a schoolgirl, "that
all that country isn't ruled by the King of Italy, but by the King of
Thieves. Who is the King of Thieves?"

"A great man," replied Muscari, "worthy to rank with your own Robin
Hood, signorina. Montano, the King of Thieves, was first heard of in the
mountains some ten years ago, when people said brigands were extinct.
But his wild authority spread with the swiftness of a silent revolution.
Men found his fierce proclamations nailed in every mountain village; his
sentinels, gun in hand, in every mountain ravine. Six times the Italian
Government tried to dislodge him, and was defeated in six pitched
battles as if by Napoleon."

"Now that sort of thing," observed the banker weightily, "would never
be allowed in England; perhaps, after all, we had better choose another
route. But the courier thought it perfectly safe."

"It is perfectly safe," said the courier contemptuously. "I have been
over it twenty times. There may have been some ol