"I have always preferred the secret service to mere routine campaigning, for, really, the waiting spoils the fighting! Poor Louis Cavagnari! He confirmed my taste for silent and outside work! I was sent out from Cabul by him as private messenger just before that cruel massacre, a faux pas, which I vainly predicted.

He taught me to play ecarte, by the way!" "Then he was a good teacher, and you--a devilish apt scholar!" laughed Anstruther, as he politely held the door open for the man who had coldly fleeced him.
Alan Hawke's pulses were now bounding with the thrill of his unlooked-for harvest! He experienced a certain pride in his marvelous skill, and, restraining himself, he soberly paced along the corridor.
The excited aid-de-camp stood for a moment with his foot on the stair, and then slowly descended.

"He suspects nothing!" the amatory youth murmured, as he passed out upon the broad Quai du Leman.
He walked swiftly along, gayly whistling "Donna e Mobile," with certain private variations of his own, until he reached the splendid monument erected to the miserly old Duke of Brunswick, who showered his scraped-up millions upon an alien city, to spite his own fat-witted Brunswickers, and so escaped the blood-fleshed talons of the hungry-Prussian eagle.
Duke Charles I hovered amiably in the air, over a comfortable carriage wherein the "other little matters" were most temptingly materialized in the person of a lovely woman waiting there with burning eyes, her splendid face veiled in a black Spanish lace scarf.

It was the old fate--"Unlucky at cards, lucky in love!" The staff officer's abrupt command to "drive everywhere, anywhere," until "further orders," was implicitly obeyed by the stolid cabby, who set off at once for a long round of the mild "lions" of fair Geneva, nestling there by the shimmering lake.
The click of the horses' feet upon the deserted roadway kept time to the murmurs of a most coy Delilah, who molded as wax in her slender hands the ardent military Samson, who was all unmindful of his flowing locks! And the silent moon shimmered down upon the waste of waters! Alan Hawke was seated for an hour alone in his room, enjoying the cigars offered up by the "Universal Provider," who had yielded up so liberally.
The strong brandy and soda had at last restored his shaken nerves, for he had played with his life staked upon the outcome! He then grimly counted up his winnings.

"Four-hundred and eighty-eight good pounds! That will take me back to Delhi in very good shape," he soliloquized.
"I wonder if there is anyway to get at that girl?
If I mistake not, she will have a half a million! The old Commissioner always liked me, too.
By God! If I could only get in between him and this baronetcy I might creep in on the girl's friendship! But the old curmudgeon keeps her locked up! Rather risky in India!" He leaned back, enjoying memories of the women with pulses of flame and hearts of glowing coal whom he had met in the days when he was "dead square." This strange woman! Who is she?
What does she know?
He dozed off until the clattering return of the Misses Phemie and Genie Forbes, of Chicago, aroused him.