rself to calmness. She warned herself that,
above all, she must remain clear-headed and collected, and act coolly
and decisively, when the moment for action arrived.

But as the seconds slipped by, and the silence remained unbroken, a
shred of forlorn hope came back to her. Each moment meant more assured
safety to her husband--he, at least, was getting away unscathed and
unsuspected. And that left her almost satisfied.

She still waited and listened. Perhaps, after all, the Prince had
taken his departure. Perhaps he had gone back to the _portier's_
office, for explanations. Perhaps it had not even been Pobloff--merely
a drunken stranger, mistaken in his room number, or servants with a
message or with linen.

She groped softly across the room, until she came to the door. She
found it draped and covered with a heavy blanket. Holding this back,
she slipped under it, and peered through the keyhole into the
illuminated hallway. There seemed to be nobody outside.

"It is a rule of the game, I believe, never to shoot the rabbit until
it is on the run!"

The words, spoken in excellent English, and barbed with a touch of
angry cynicism, smote on her startled ears like an Alpine thunderclap.

She emerged from under the blanket, slowly, ignominiously, ashamed of
even her Peeping-Tom abandonment of dignity.

As she did so she saw herself being looked at with keen but placid
eyes. The owner of the eyes in one hand held a lighted bedroom lamp.
In his other hand he held a flat, short-barreled pocket revolver, of
burnished gun-metal, and she could see the lamplight glimmer along its
side as it menaced her.

She did not gasp--nor did she shrink away, for with her the situation
was not so novel as her antagonist might have imagined. Indeed, as she
gazed back at him, motionless, she saw the look of increasing wonder
which crept, almost involuntarily, over his white, lean, Slavic-looking
face.

Frances Durkin knew it was Pobloff. He was tall, exceptionally tall,
and she noticed that he carried off his faultlessness of attire with
that stiff but tranquil _hauteur_ which seems to come only with a
military training. The forehead was high and white and prominent, with
oddly marked depressions, now thrown into shadow by the lamp light,
above and behind the highly-arched eyebrows, on each extremity of the
frontal bone. The nose was long and narrow-bridged, and the face
itself was unusually long and narrow, and now quite