was a fool--a damned fool, yesterday," he cheerfully ruminated. "If
I only handle this woman rightly, then I may get the hold I want
on this old recluse Johnstone, congested with the fat pickings of
forty-five years. A close-mouthed old rat is he, and yet it seems
that he is vulnerable after all. If he is playing fast and loose
with the government he will never get his honors before he gives
up the sleeping trust of the forgotten years."

Major Hawke vainly tried to follow the exuberant Anstruther in his
incursion into the placid temple of Minerva, where that watchful
spinster, Miss Euphrosyne Delande, eyed somewhat icily the handsome.
young "Greek bearing gifts." Professional prudence and the memory
of certain judiciously smothered escapades caused Miss Euphrosyne
at first to retire within her moral breast works and draw up the
sally-port bridge. For even in chilly Geneva, young hearts throb in
nature's flooding lava passions, jealously bodiced in school-girl
buckram and glacial swiss muslin. So it was very cool for a time
in the august cavern of conference where Anson Anstruther, a bright
Ithuriel, struggled with the cautious and covetous Swiss preceptress,
and the swift steamer Chilian was far up the lake before Captain
the victorious Honorable Anson Anstruther, sped away to the morning
meeting with the woman who had seemed to lean down from the moon-lit
skies upon her young Endymion in that starry night by the throbbing
lake.

Major Alan Hawke, proceeding on his voyage, found a certain bitterness in
the distant mental contemplation of Captain Anstruther's employment
of his leisure till train time, not knowing that the young soldier's
sense of duty led him first to dispatch several careful official
dispatches, one to London, and the two others to Calcutta and Delhi,