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."