Nothing can be seen." "Good! Remember! Nine o'clock sees you at your post! You are prepared ?" The woman's voice trembled.
"Thoroughly!" cried the alert servitor, "Only give me your signal! I must make no mistake! There's no time to think in such cases!" He bent his head, while his mistress, in a low voice gave her last orders.

Jules saluted, as if he were the leader of a forlorn hope.
"And now for the first skirmish!" mused Berthe Louison, as she personally examined some matters, of more material interest to her, in the reception-room.
The rearrangement of the furniture seemed to be satisfactory, and Madame Berthe Louison composedly busied herself with the arrangement of a writing case, and a few womanly articles upon the table which she had chosen as her own peculiar fortification.

A few moments were wasted upon trifling with a well-worn envelope, now carefully hidden in her bosom.
This maneuver passed the time needed for a stately carriage to sweep up from the opened grand gate of the bungalow to the raised veranda steps.
"There he is!" she grimly said.

"Now, for the first blood!" A man who was shaking with mingled rage and fear hastily strode across the broad portico, as Berthe Louison glided away from the curtained window and confidently resumed her own chosen chair.

Her bosom was heaving, her eye was fixed and stern, and she steadily awaited her foe, for one last warning whisper had reached her hidden servitor.
When Marie Victor threw open the double doors of the reception room, on its threshold stood the towering form of the man whom Alixe Delavigne had known in other years as Hugh Fraser, the man whose pallid face told her that he knew at last that he was under the sword of Damocles! Clad in white linen, his sun helmet in his hand, steadying himself with a jeweled bamboo crutch-handled stick, the old Anglo-Indian waited until Berthe Louison's voice rang out, as clear as a silver bell: "Marie! I am not to be interrupted." she calmly said.