ere will be, after
midnight, a key upon the mantelpiece in the sitting-room."

"But Miss Delora?" I asked. "What of her? The sitting-room connects,
also, with her apartments."

"Mademoiselle will be told something of this during the evening,"
Louis answered. "It will be better. She will have retired and be
locked in her room long before it will be necessary for you to
ascend."

"Very well," I said. "But now for the practical side of it. If
anything really happens, what is to be my excuse for occupying those
apartments to-night?"

"I will provide you with a sufficient one later on," Louis
promised. "You will dine downstairs?"

"Possibly," I answered.

"In which case we can have a little conversation," Louis remarked.

"Louis," I said, "what sort of an affair is this, really, in which I
am mixing myself up? Am I one of a gang of magnificent criminals, a
political conspirator, or a fool?"

Louis smiled.

"Monsieur," he said, "I found you very weary of life. I will put you
in the way of finding excitement. Monsieur should ask no more than
that. There are many men of his temperament who would give years of
their life for the chance."

He left me with his usual polite bow. I strolled after him down the
corridor a moment or so later, but I just missed the lift in which he
descended. Looking down, I saw that it had stopped at the fifth
floor. It seemed as though Louis had gone to visit number 157!

CHAPTER XVI

TWO OF A TRADE

I smoked two pipes, one after the other, in a vain attempt to draw out
some definite sequence of facts from the tangled web of happenings
into which I seemed to have strayed. I came to the conclusion that
Fate, which had bestowed on me a physique of more than ordinary size,
a sound constitution, and muscles which had filled my study with
various kinds of trophies, had not been equally generous in her
dispensation of brains. Try as I would, I could make nothing of the
situation in which I found myself. The most reasonable thing seemed to
be to conclude that Louis was one of a gang of thieves, that I was
about to become their accomplice, and that Felicia was simply the
Delilah with whom these people had summoned me to their aid. Such a
conclusion, however, was not flattering, nor did it please me in any
way. Directly I allowed myself to think of Felicia, I believed in her.
There were none of the arts of the adventuress about her methods, her
glances, or her words. She did not, for