A few moments later the ugly, uncouth man who had brought him from Monte Carlo lit a cigarette, and wishing the old woman a merry "addio" left and descended the stairs.
The signora then showed Hugh to his room, a small, dispiriting and not overclean little chamber which looked out upon the backs of the adjoining houses, all of which were high and inartistic. Above, however, was a narrow strip of brilliantly blue sunlit sky.
A quarter of an hour later he made the acquaintance of the woman's husband, a brown-faced, sinister-looking individual whose black bushy eyebrows met, and who greeted the young Englishman familiarly in atrocious French, offering him a glass of red wine from a big rush-covered flask.
"We only had word of your coming late last night," the man said. "You had already started from Monte Carlo, and we wondered if you would get past the frontier all right."
"Yes," replied Hugh, sipping the wine out of courtesy. "We got out of France quite safely. But tell me, who made all these arrangements for me?"
"Why, Il Passero, of course," replied the man, whose wife addressed him affectionately as Beppo.
"Who is Il Passero, pray?"
"Well, you know him surely. Il Passero, or The Sparrow. We call him so because he is always flitting about Europe, and always elusive."
"The police want him, I suppose."
"I should rather think they do. They have been searching for him for these past five years, but he always dodges them, first in France, then here, then in Spain, and then in England."
"But what is this mysterious and unknown friend of mine?"
"Il Passero is the chief of the most daring of all the gangs of international thieves. We all work at his direction."
"But how did he know of my danger?" asked Hugh, mystified and dismayed.
"Il Passero knows many strange things," he replied with a grin. "It is his business to know them. And besides, he has some friends in the police--persons who never suspect him."
"What nationality is he?"
The man Beppo shrugged his shoulders.
"He is not Italian," he replied. "Yet he speaks the lingua Toscano perfectly and French and English and Tedesco. He might be Belgian or German, or even English. Nobody knows his true nationality."
"And the man who brought me here?"
"Ah! that was Paolo, Il Passero's chauffeur--a merry fellow--eh?"
"Remarkable," laughed Hugh. "But I cannot see why The Sparrow has taken such a paternal interest in me," he added.
"He no doubt has, for he has, apparently, arranged for your safe return to England."
"You know him, of course. What manner of man is he?"