backward from the presence of the poor old woman whom he had duped,
as if she were a queen.

It was an easy matter for the Englishman to waylay and intercept
the returning man-at-arms of this castle of cosmopolitan beauty.
Francois had duly availed himself of his lengthened absence,
and his thick tongue and swimming eye spoke of potations of the
Kirsch-wasser dear to the Swiss heart. Major Hawke impressed the
servitor with the necessity of bringing the pictures down to his
rooms upon the morrow, and then the Major judiciously duplicated his
five-franc piece. The happy butler winked with an acute divination
of the Major's purpose and went unsteadily back to the whirlpool
of learning. The Major cheerfully went on his own way to meet Miss
Genie Forbes, with whom he had established a private understanding
as to a runaway visit to the Cathedral, to be followed by an
impromptu breakfast. "I can stand the old Gorgon's dinner," mused
the happy adventurer, "after a tete-a-tete with Miss Genie, and as
for Francois, I will also waste a bottle of good Cognac on him. I
think that I will start into this strange partnership with a better
stock of family history than even this remarkably self-possessed
young woman, who seems to be the heiress of some old family vendetta."

The Major laughed as he heard the mills of the gods grinding out a
golden grist of the future. But lifted up beyond the impulses of
his itching palm the sight of the delicate, girlish face of the
Rosebud of Delhi had caused him to dream the strangest dreams. "Why
not?" he murmured as he wandered back to the hotel and privately
indulged in a petit verre before his rendezvous with Miss Genie,
the belle of the West Side. Major Alan Hawke was in "great form"
as he piloted the bright-eyed, willful Chicago girl through the dim