necessity not only unmarried but practically friendless. Other
attributes of his will obviously comprise youth, courage, imagination,
a rather high order of intelligence, and a social position--let us say,
rather, an ostensible business--enabling him to travel at will hither
and yon without exciting comment. So far, good! My friend the Chief of
the Surete forthwith commissioned his agents to seek such an one, and
by this means several fine fish were enmeshed in the net of suspicion,
carefully scrutinized, and one by one let go--all except one, the
veritable man. Him they sedulously watched, shadowing him across Europe
and back again. He was in Berlin at the time of the famous Rheinart
robbery, though he compassed that coup without detection; he was in
Vienna when the British embassy there was looted, but escaped by a
clever ruse and managed to dispose of his plunder before the agents of
the Surete could lay hands on him; recently he has been in London, and
there he made love to, and ran away with, the diamonds of a certain
lady of some eminence. You have heard of Madame Omber, eh?" Now by
Roddy's expression it was plain that, if Madame Omber's name wasn't
strange in his hearing, at least he found this news about her most
surprising. He was frankly staring, with a slackened jaw and with
stupefaction in his blank blue eyes.

Lanyard gently pinched the small end of a cigar, dipped it into his
coffee, and lighted it with not so much as a suspicion of tremor. His
brain, however, was working rapidly in effort to determine whether De
Morbihan meant this for warning, or was simply narrating an amusing
yarn founded on advance information and amplified by an ingenious
imagination. For by now the news of the Omber affair must have thrilled
many a Continental telegraph-wire....

"Madame Omber--of course!" the American agreed thoughtfully.