in a brace of shakes, and be after me like a pack of ravening wolves.
The race is to the swift this time, gentlemen, and you'll have to take a
long way round if you mean to head me off."

Then he passed down into the darkness, closed the trap-door after him,
shot into its socket the bolt he had screwed there, flashed up the
light of his electric torch, and, _without_ the password, turned toward
the sewers, and ran, and ran, and ran!

III

It lacked but a minute of the stroke of twelve, and the revels at "The
Twisted Arm"--wild at all times, but wilder to-night than ever--were at
their noisiest and most exciting pitch. And why not? It was not often
that Margot could spend a whole night with her rapscallion crew, and she
had been here since early evening and was to remain here until the dawn
broke gray over the housetops and the murmurs of the workaday world
awoke anew in the streets of the populous city. It was not often that
each man and each abandoned woman present knew to a certainty that he or
she would go home through the mists of the gray morning with a fistful
of gold that had been won without labour or the taking of any personal
risk; and to-night the half of four hundred thousand francs was to be
divided among them.

No wonder they had made a carnival of it, and tricked themselves out in
gala attire; no wonder they had brought a paste tiara and crowned
Margot. Margot, was in flaming red to-night, and looked a devil's
daughter indeed, with her fire-like sequins and her red ankles twinkling
as she threw herself into the thick of the dance and kicked, and
whirled, and flung her bare arms about to the lilt of the music and the
fluting of her own happy laughter.

"Per Baccho! The devil's in her to-night!" grinned old Marise, the
innkeeper, from her place behind the bar, where the lid of the
sewer-trap opened. "She has not been like it since the Cracksman broke
with her, Toinette. But that was before your time, ma fille. Mother of
the heavens! but there was a man for you! There was a king that was
worthy of such a queen. Name of disaster! that she could not hold him,
that the curse of virtue sapped such a splendid tree, and that she could
take up with another after him!"

"Why not?" cried Toinette, as she tossed down the last half of her
absinthe and twitched her flower-crowned head. "A kingdom must have a
king, ma mere; and Dieu! but he is handsome, this Monsieur Gaston
Merode! And if he carries out his pa