ys hammering at, and break a leg, or even sprain an
ankle!" said the gallant Polish nobleman. "Wouldn't that be a lucky
accident for me!"

All things, it is said, come to those who know how to wait. One
afternoon M. Moriaz climbed up a very steep slope of crumbling rock, and
came to a narrow gorge over which he was afraid to leap. He could not
descend by the way he had come up, for the slope was really dangerous.
It looked as though he should have to wait hours, and perhaps, days,
until some herdsman passed by; and he began to shout wildly in the hopes
of attracting attention. To his great joy, his shout was answered, and
Count Larinski climbed up the other side of the gorge, carrying a plank,
torn from a fence he passed on his way. By means of this, he bridged the
gorge, and rescued the father of Antoinette, and naturally, he had to
accompany him to the hotel, and stay to dinner. As we have said, Count
Larinski was a very handsome man; tall, broad-shouldered, with strange
green eyes touched with soft golden tints. When he began to talk, simply
and modestly of the part he had played in the last Polish Revolution
against the despotic power of Russia, Antoinette felt at last that she
was in the presence of a hero. And what a cultivated man he was! He
played the piano divinely, and they passed many pleasant evenings
together. One night, the Count left behind him a piece of music,
inscribed "Abel Larinski." "Surely," Mlle. Moriaz thought, "I have seen
that writing somewhere!" Her breath came quickly, as with a trembling
hand she took out of her bosom the letter which had been sent with the
flowers, and compared the handwritings. They were identical.

_II.--A Conversation with a Dead Man_

Just a week afterwards, Count Larinski had a very serious conversation
with his partner, Samuel Brohl. The strange thing about the conversation
was that there was only one man in the room, and he talked all the time
to himself. Sometimes he spoke in German with lapses into Yiddish, and
any one would then have said that he was Samuel Brohl, a notorious
Jewish adventurer. Then, recovering himself, he talked in Polish, and he
might have been mistaken for a Polish gentleman. He seemed to be a man
who was trying to study a difficult matter from two different points of
view, and he undoubtedly had an actor's talent for throwing himself into
the character of the nobleman he was impersonating.

"Do you see," said Samuel Brohl, "fortune at l