While Ram Lal glowered in his dissatisfaction, Madame Berthe Louison complacently regarded her two secret protectors on guard in the special car.

For the strange turn of Fortune's wheel, which had left Alixe Delavigne alone in the world, and rich enough to effect her special vengeance upon her one enemy, had given to Jules Victor and his wife Marie a sinecure for life as the personal attendants of the soi-disant Madame Berthe Louison.
Marie was but a wild-eyed child of ten when Jules had picked her up in the flaming streets of Paris, and they had graduated together from the gutters of Montmartre into the later control of Madame Louison's pretty little pied d' terre in Paris, hard by Auteuil, in that dreamy little impasse, the Rue de Berlioz.

Neither of these attendants were faint-hearted, for their young hearts had been attuned early to the wolfish precocity of the Parisian waif.

And they had followed their resolute mistress in her weary quest of the past years.
Berthe Louison smiled in a comforting sense of security, as she gazed listlessly out upon the landscape flying by.
The two servants, modestly voyaging out to Calcutta, on a telegraphic summons, to embark at Marseilles, had preceded the Empress of India by ten days.

So, neither friendless, nor without untiring devotion, was the wary woman who had thus secretly armed herself against any "little mistake" on the part of Major Alan Hawke.