his friend's, ears that lay slightly away from his
head, and a large, rather loose, clean-shaven mouth. Between his eyes
were three straight lines, for his brow wore a constant look of care and
anxiety. He did not possess that careless, easy, gentlemanly air of
Ansell, but was of a coarser and commoner French type, the type one
meets every day in the Montmartre, which was, indeed, the home of
Adolphe Carlier.

Ansell walked to the door, opened it as if to ascertain there was no
eavesdropper, and, closing and locking it, returned to his friend's
side.

"I sent for you, my dear friend, because I want you," he said, in a low
voice, gazing straight at him.

"Anything good?" asked the other, stretching out his legs and placing
his clasped hands behind his head wearily.

"Yes, an easy job. The usual game."

"A jeweller's?"

Ansell nodded in the affirmative.

"Where?"

"Not far from here."

"Much stuff?"

"A lot of good stones."

"And the safe?"

"Easy enough with the jet," Ansell answered. "You've brought over all
the things, I suppose?"

"Yes. But it was infernally risky. I was afraid the Customs might open
them at Charing Cross," Carlier replied.

"You never need fear. They never open anything here. This is not like
Calais or Boulogne."

"I shan't take them back."

"You won't require to, my dear Adolphe," laughed Ansell, who, though in
London he posed as a young man of means, was well known in a certain
criminal set in Paris as "The American," because of his daring exploits
in burglary and robbery with violence.

A year before, this exemplary young man, together with Adolphe Carlier,
known as "_Fil-en-Quatre_," or "The Eel," had been members of the
famous Bonnemain gang, to whose credit stood some of the greatest and
most daring jewel robberies in France. For several years the police had
tried to bring their crimes home to them, but without avail, until the
great robbery at Louis Verrier's, in the Rue des Petit-Champs, when a
clerk in the employ of the well-known diamond dealer was shot dead by
Paul Bonnemain. The latter was arrested, tried for murder, and executed,
the gang being afterwards broken up.

The malefactors had numbered eight, six of whom, including Bonnemain
himself, had been arrested, the only ones escaping being Carlier, who
had fled to Bordeaux, where he had worked at the docks till the affair
had blown over, while Ansell, whose _dossier_ showed a very bad record,
had sought refuge