If you have ever had to walk unconcernedly into the crowded vestibule of a fashionable hotel, not knowing at what moment you might be identified and arrested as a notorious criminal, you will no doubt understand, and, perhaps, sympathise with Slyne's state of mind as he entered the HÔtel de Paris. If not, you can at least imagine how he felt as he made his way through the throng toward the bureau, grimly conscious of every inquisitive glance.

There was little enough to shield him from immediate detection, beyond the flight of time and the facts that he had been wearing a beard and living under a French alias—or, as he would have preferred to put it, incognito—when, only a season or two before, he had earned such undesired and undesirable distinction throughout the CÔte d'Azur. And he knew very well what his fate would be if he were recognised.

He was very devoutly thankful, therefore, when, having safely run the gauntlet of all those argus eyes which had seemed to be searching his by the way, he found himself installed in an ornate apartment vacated only that morning by a grand duke.

"I can't afford to do things by halves now!" he had reflected, shrugging his shoulders, as he had agreed with the manager, who happened to be on the spot, that the suite in question would probably serve his turn. And even the manager had been impressed by his manner—and his fine car.

"So far, so good, then," said Slyne to himself with a somewhat nervous grimace, as he crossed to the window of his sitting-room and looked out over the moonlit bay, after tossing his keys to a valet with a curt order to lose no time. "And now—I must go on as I've begun. But—I can't help wishing I were well through with it all. I didn't half like the way that clerk watched me with his mouth wide open—and I knew him all right!"

No one could have appeared more care-free, however, than he when, an hour later, he left his dressing-room, ready to face—and outface—the detective talent he still must meet, and sauntered very much at his leisure, a cigarette between his tight lips, in the direction of the table d'hÔte.

"Seems pretty dull here," he commented, after an indifferent inspection of the elaborate company there. "I've a good mind to go on to Ciro's—and find out if they have forgotten my face by now too. I won't have any peace of mind till I've been all round the old place." In pursuit of which bold policy he sent a page for his coat and hat, and stood displaying himself to the general public till they arrived.

He found Ciro's well filled, as usual, when he strolled in, taking with perfect outward calm the risk that he might be remembered there. But no hostile glance met his roving eye as he entered the restaurant. He was obsequiously received by an observant head-waiter, and shown to a table which suited his immediate needs to a nicety.

Among the more ebullient gathering in that gay resort he could discover no cause for alarm. And no one took any special notice of him until, among some still later comers, he noticed a haggardly handsome woman, in a gown so scant that she might well have been glad of the great bunch of camellias she wore at her breast, who was pointing him out to one of the two men in her company.

Slyne's heart almost stopped beating at that, and one of his hands involuntarily slipped round to where, in a padded pocket within the arm-hole of his thin evening-coat, he had a little double-barrelled pistol concealed.

He caught the woman's eye again while she was whispering volubly to the attentive listener at her elbow, a fashionably foolish-looking young man of a stamp whose appearance is sometimes deceitful, and wondered sickly what was coming as that individual, having looked him over quite openly and with the aid of an eye-glass, rose and approached him across the room.

He glanced up in admirably assumed surprise, however, for all answer to the other's gruffly casual, "Good evenin', sir.

"Will you excuse my askin' whether you'd care to sell the car I saw you drivin' past in, an hour ago?" inquired the stranger, quite unabashed. "Because—I want it, don't y'know."

Slyne's face remained an immobile mask, although in his heart he was dully conscious of an almost overwhelming sense of relief.

"It isn't for sale at the moment," he answered, suavely enough, but as if a little offended.

"But—I want it," reiterated the stranger, who did not seem to lack a sufficient sense of his own importance. "And I'll give you practically your own price for it. It's for a lady, don't y'know—and as a favour to me, eh?"

"I'd be very glad to oblige you," said Slyne, elated beyond expression to find not only that his fears had been groundless, that his visitor was really a fool and not a knave in disguise, but also that, if he played his own cards properly, he might pocket a still fatter profit upon his car than he had anticipated, "but—I can't at the moment. Are you going to be here for a few days?"

"I'm at the Cap Martin for a week. As soon as you change your mind you can come over an' see me there. Ask for Lord Ingoldsby. Good evenin' to you," answered his visitor with all the sulky insolence of a spoiled child; and slouched back to his own table, where, Slyne had the satisfaction of seeing, he had to endure a rating from his enchantress for his ill-success on her errand. And Slyne almost smiled.

For he knew the Marquis of Ingoldsby quite well, by repute at least, as an English pigeon with feathers well worth the plucking, and set the other two down for what they were, a pair of those hawks to be found hovering wherever the simple pigeon would try its wings. He became contemplatively interested in the trio, although he knew the ways of that wicked world far too well to suppose for an instant that he would be allowed to make a quartette of it.

"But you shall have your car, madame," he soliloquised, "presently, when I'm finished with it. And, in exchange, I'll take—"

"If only I had Sallie here now—" he said to himself with sudden self-pity, and then was seized with a hot contempt for all such as the noble marquis. "But no one under a royalty need hope for an introduction to her then," he finished, and so stifled an inconvenient twinge of conscience.

"In the meantime it looks to me as if my little overdraft on the future is going to pay me most handsomely," he reflected. And that happy thought added zest to his appetite for the excellent dinner his waiter had ordered for him, the first good dinner to which he had sat down in endless months.

He had given the man carte blanche in the matter of viands, only reserving the choice of what he should drink. So that when he ordered Vichy the waiter was not unduly depressed. Slyne also would have preferred to see a silver bucket beside the table, a pursy gold neck protruding from it, but he wanted all his wits about him that evening, while he was once more pitting himself, alone, against all comers in Monte Carlo—and, incidentally, against the odds in favour of the bank, on which he hoped to draw to the tune of at least a hundred thousand dollars during the next few days. He knew, of expensive experience, that the Widow Clicquot and her charming companions are safer society after a dangerous campaign is over than just before it begins.

He would not even venture upon an after-dinner cigar, contenting himself with a cigarette from the plain gold case with a crest on it which he purchased from the chauffeur he had so providentially picked up in Genoa that afternoon. But he tipped the waiter with such profusion that the man preceded him to the door bent almost double with gratitude, and even the Marquis of Ingoldsby was staringly impressed by the magnificence of his exit—as Slyne had intended he should be.

His masterly impersonation of an unostentatious millionaire was not without its effect on the flunkeys of the Casino also. These made as much of his entrance as he in his assumed modesty would allow on his way into the salles de jeu, where he attracted not a few appraising, inquisitive glances while he once more dared discovery as he roamed from table to table, gazing about him as though that had really been his first visit there. The world and the half-world alike seemed to be wondering who he might be; a circumstance which, otherwise, would have caused him ecstatic pleasure.

It has been stated already that he was more than passably good-looking, with regular profile and straight, spare, elegant figure. In evening clothes which fitted him to perfection, neither over-groomed nor untidy in any detail, without a flaw for the most fastidious to pick in either appearance or manner, he seemed to bear some stamp of distinction which might very well have passed current in circles much more exclusive.

The rooms were well filled, although the really fashionable world had just begun to flock south for the winter. The usual motley went to make up the highly-coloured mosaic of worshippers at the chief shrine of the goddess of chance. It would be a waste of your time and mine, too, to describe again the types to be observed there, and Slyne had seen them all very often before. He sauntered about for a little and then slipped quietly into the only seat which had been vacated since he had arrived, much to the annoyance of a short, fat Frenchman who seemed disposed to insist on his own prior claim to it, till Slyne glanced over one shoulder into his eyes.

"Good luck to you!" cried a jovial voice from the other side of the table as he sat down, and Slyne nodded coldly to his companion of the afternoon.

He did not desire Mr. Jobling's further acquaintance, and would have ignored his greeting entirely but that he had noticed in front of the stout solicitor quite a noteworthy stack of winnings; and he did not know whether he might not yet have occasion to draw on the other's expressed ambition to repay him a favour done. In any case, he dismissed all such ideas from his mind for the moment, and started to play, very cautiously.

A cautious player, who can keep his head, need seldom lose a great deal at any game. Slyne had drunk nothing stronger than Vichy since the night before. He was tensely on the alert. His luck came and went until he had lost a couple of thousand francs, and then he began to win.

He had been winning, slowly but surely, with only an occasional set-back, for over an hour before he became aware that a growing group of interested onlookers had gathered behind him, and that he had accumulated within the space between his protective elbows a pile of notes and gold which reached to his chin. And, thus convinced that he was in the vein, spurred on by some sudden remembrance of Sallie caged in her cabin on the Olive Branch, an ever-present temptation to play to the gallery, to stake no less than the maximum on every turn of the wheel, had almost vanquished all his discretion when he encountered the quiet glance of a man who was contemplating him from behind the players seated at the other side of the table, a man whom he knew only too well as one of the cleverest of those mouchards whose frequent comings and goings attract so little attention there, and who knew him.

The brilliant lights about him grew strangely blurred. He felt faint and ill. But, by a desperate effort of will, he managed to maintain an outward composure. He yawned openly, and then let his eyes fall to look at his watch. The detective was carelessly moving round the table in his direction. He shifted his rake to his left hand and, slipping his right across his chest to within the lapel of his evening-coat, laid out some small further stake, entirely at random.

He lost that, and two or three more, before he yawned again, as if fatigued by such trifling, and pushed a much larger amount into place, as a blind man might, for a final venture. No hand had as yet fallen on his shoulder, but the suspense of not knowing at what moment that would happen was hard to bear. He felt like one in the grip of a hideous nightmare as the croupier presently shovelled over toward him a large and miscellaneous assortment of notes and gold and counters, which, none the less, he collected indifferently and dully conscious of an envious sigh from behind him.

He hesitated a little before letting go his hold of the pistol about whose butt the fingers of his right hand were still closely clasped, in order to pocket his profits of the evening. He had laid down his rake. It was at once seized by a woman who had been standing close at his shoulder, and, as she pushed eagerly past him into his seat, the bunch of camellias in her corsage brushed his face. It was the woman with whom Lord Ingoldsby had been dining. Slyne noticed her husband among the crowd in the rear as he himself made his way out into the open. He noticed also, approaching him entirely as if by accident, the inconspicuous spy whose appearance there had so alarmed him.

Slyne had not even time to hesitate. Without the slightest change of expression he stopped and confronted his enemy, addressing him by name, in the execrable French of the average Englishman.

"Bon soir, M. Dubois. Comment Ça va? Bien, eh?"

"Monsieur has the advantage of me," the detective returned in effortless English, and over his features flitted the faintest shadow of disappointment.

"Oh, I scarcely supposed you would know me," said Slyne with a deprecatory shrug. "This is my first trip so far afield, though I've seen you several times in Paris, and we all know you quite well in London, of course."

The faintest shadow of what might have developed into a smile hovered for an instant about the famous man-hunter's lips and eyes, and Slyne made a mental note of the fact that he was not above being flattered.

"I'm over here after a fat fellow called Jobling," continued Slyne, ingratiatingly communicative. "I don't suppose you know anything about him?"

The other sniffed, disdainfully.

"An embryo embezzler," said he, in a tone of such conscious superiority that Slyne would surely have laughed in his face if he himself had felt safe. "Give him rope enough and he'll do the rest. Don't disclose yourself for a day or two, but watch him carefully.

"Are you working for New Scotland Yard?"

Slyne had expected some such question, and did not stammer over his answer.

"I've started a private agency on my own account. This is my first case. A thousand thanks for your hint. If all my official friends were as courteous, life would be much pleasanter for me." He spoke with a most respectful inflection, but always in barbarous Anglo-French. "Mille remerciements encore, mon confrÈre. Et maintenant—À demain."

His new acquaintance nodded with most gracious condescension and moved on in the direction of an obese German diplomatist who had just met amid the throng and greeted with over-acted surprise a pretty Viennese countess. And Slyne did not fail to observe, amid all his own agitation, how promptly the two of them parted again at sight of M. Dubois.

He was conscious that his own nostrils were nervously twitching, and that there were tiny beads of cold perspiration about his forehead.

"He thought he knew me," said he to himself, very tremulously. "And, though I've put him off the scent to some extent, he'll root about till—" For all his nerve of steel, he shivered and changed countenance.

"I can't trust myself to play any more to-night—and just when I was getting my hand in! But I suppose I may thank my stars that I'm no worse off since I caught his eye—he'd have been down on me in an instant, if I had so much as blinked. And now I must bluff him out—I'm not going to be scared off.

"There's this about it, anyhow—if I've really got him hoodwinked, none of the others need worry me!" With which conditional self-encouragement, and having made sure that his enemy was no longer watching him, he turned back on an impulse, to see how Mr. Jobling was getting on. But Mr. Jobling had already gone off with his winnings.

"I wonder if he'd take a hand at ÉcartÉ now?" thought Slyne. "His name came in very useful just now—and I might as well have my own money back out of him while he's got it. He'll probably be fancying himself at the moment, too."

And with that business-like ambition before him, he roamed the rooms till he could be sure that his proposed victim was nowhere within the Casino. Among the multitude there he could run across no one else who seemed likely to prove easy prey. So he gave up the quest with a philosophical shrug, got his coat and hat, and sauntered out on to the terrace, a fragrant cigar between his thin lips.

"And I'll stand myself a bottle of something at supper, to buck me up," he promised himself. "I'll look into Ciro's again presently, and get the good of the gold piece I had to waste on that scoundrelly waiter. If I chance across Jobling there, I'll get a free meal as well; or, if I should see that ass Ingoldsby, I'll tackle him while his precious keepers are out of the way. They're evidently making his feathers fly!"

The night was still, and even unusually mild for that season of the year. The moon had disappeared. Slyne looked down at the sea, all dark and mysterious, with a strong feeling of distaste; he had lately seen more than enough of it to last him a lifetime. He turned his steps toward the deserted gardens, to escape a party of chattering tourists who had trespassed on his privacy.

He was in no hurry at all for supper, and wanted a few minutes of peace and quietness in which to compose his still troubled mind, and to consider the situation as touching his lordship of Ingoldsby—who would undoubtedly prove a far more profitable companion than Mr. Jobling, even although the latter should have won the fifty thousand francs that had been his ambition.

"What a fool that fellow is, for a lawyer!" mused Slyne, having more or less successfully combated an inclination to let his thoughts stray back to the Olive Branch—and Sallie. And, Click! something answered him from behind a bush not very far from the verge of the path he was meditatively pacing.

He jumped aside at the sound, as any man would who has known what it is to be ambushed, and then, recollecting himself, stood still, with a mirthless, annoyed half-smile. He did not believe that Dubois would adopt any such noisy means to get rid of him, but—none the less, he felt impelled to find out who was in hiding behind that bush.