llions of crowns, a woman's love, the fall of one dynasty and the
rise of another, all wadded in those innocent looking gun barrels!
He hesitated for a space, then unlocked the breech and held the tubes
toward the window. There was nothing in the barrels, nothing but the
golden sunlight, which glinted along the polished steel.

CHAPTER XIV. QUI M'AIME, AIME MON CHIEN

On making this discovery Maurice was inclined to declaim in that
vigorous vocabulary which is taboo. He had been tricked. He was no
longer needed at the Red Chateau. Four millions in a gun barrel; hoax
was written all over the face of it, and yet he had been as unsuspicious
as a Highland gillie. Madame had tricked him; the countess had tricked
him, the Colonel and Fitzgerald.

That Madame had tricked him created no surprise; what irritated him most
was the conviction that Fitzgerald was laughing in his sleeve, and that
he had misjudged the Englishman's capacity for dissimulation. Very well.
He threw the gun on the bed; he took Fitzgerald's pipe from his pocket
and cast it after the gun, and with a gesture which placed all the
contents of the room under the ban of his anathema, he strode out into
the corridor, thence to the office.

Here the message to Madame from Beauvais flashed back. The Colonel of
the royal cuirassiers had lied; he had found the certificates. But still
there was a cloud of mystery; to what use could Beauvais put them? He
threw the key to the landlord.

"You lied to me when you said that no one had entered that room," he
said.

"O, Herr, I told you that no one but the police had been in the room
since your departure. They made a search the next morning. Herr Hamilton
was suspected of being a spy of the duchy's. I could not interfere with
the police."

Maurice saw that there was nothing to be got from the landlord, who was
as much in the dark as he. He passed into the street and walked without
any particular end in view. O, he would return to the Red Chateau, if
only to deliver himself of the picturesque and opinionated address on
Madame. Once he saw his reflection in a window glass, and he stopped and
muttered at it.

"Eh, bien, as Madame herself says, we develop with crises, and certainly
there is one not far distant. I never could write what I wish to say to
Madame; I'll go back to-morrow morning."

Situated between the university and the Grand Hotel on the left hand
side of the Konigstrasse, east, stood an historica