u when you turned so
white?" I said, suddenly.

The Lizard turned his glowing eyes on me.

"Was the man's name--Mornac?" I asked, at a hopeless venture.

The Lizard shivered; I needed no reply, not even his hoarse, "Are you
the devil, that you know all things?"

I looked at him wonderingly. What wrong could Mornac have done a
ragged outcast here on the Breton coast? And where was Mornac? Had he
left Paris in time to avoid the Prussian trap? Was he here in this
country, rubbing elbows with Buckhurst?

"Did Tric-Trac tell you that Mornac was at the head of that band?" I
demanded.

"Why do you ask me?" stammered the Lizard; "you know
everything--even when it is scarcely whispered!"

The superstitious astonishment of the man, his utter collapse and his
evident fear of me, did not suit me. Treachery comes through that kind
of fear; I meant to rule him in another and safer manner. I meant to
be absolutely honest with him.

It was difficult to persuade him that I had only guessed the name
whispered; that, naturally, I should think of Mornac as a high officer
of police, and particularly so since I knew him to be a villain, and
had also divined his relations with Buckhurst.

I drew from the poacher that Tric-Trac had named Mornac as head of the
communistic plot in Brittany; that Mornac was coming to Paradise very
soon, and that then something gay might be looked for.

And that night I took Speed into my confidence and finally Kelly Eyre,
our balloonist.

And we talked the matter over until long after midnight.

XV

FOREWARNED

The lions had now begun to give me a great deal of trouble. Timour
Melek, the old villain, sat on his chair, snarling and striking at me,
but still going through his paces; Empress Khatoun was a perfect devil
of viciousness, and refused to jump her hoops; even poor little Aicha,
my pet, fed by me soon after her foster-mother, a big Newfoundland,
had weaned her, turned sullen in the pyramid scene. I roped her and
trimmed her claws; it was high time.

Oh, they knew, and I knew, that matters had gone wrong with me; that I
had, for a time, at least, lost the intangible something which I once
possessed--that occult right to dominate.

It worried me; it angered me. Anger in authority, which is a weakness,
is quickly discovered by beasts.

Speed's absurd superstition continued to recur to me at inopportune
moments; in my brain his voice was ceaselessly sounding--"A man in
love, a m