and that an electric alarm bell be connected with her
sleeping apartment and his.

"Your hirelings will tamper with his birds and his effects in the
night--I know that, Monsieur le Comte," she had said when she demanded
this. "He is a nervous fellow, this poor Clopin; I wish him to be able
to ring for help if you and your men go too far."

Clopin was sitting by the window chattering to his birds when Cleek
entered, and a glance at him was sufficient to decide two points: first,
he was not disguised, nor was his partial blindness in any way a sham,
for an idiot could have seen that the droop of the left eyelid over the
staring, palpably artificial eye which glazed over the empty socket
beneath was due to perfectly natural causes; and, second, that the man
was indeed what the Count had said he resembled, namely, a gutter-bred
outcast.

"French!" was Cleek's silent comment upon him. "One of those charlatans
who infest the streets of Paris with their so-called 'fortune-telling
birds,' who, for ten centimes, pick out an envelope with their beaks as
a means of telling you what the future is supposed to hold. What has
made a woman like this pick up a fellow of his stamp? Hum-m-m! Puppy, I
think you are a good move," stroking the ears of the mongrel dog; "a
very much better move than a cage of useless parakeets that are meant to
throw suspicion in the wrong direction and have a seed-cup so large and
so obviously overfilled that it is safe to say there is nothing hidden
in it and never has been! And madame has a fancy for waxlights," his
gaze travelling upward to the glittering chandelier. "Hum-m-m! How well
they know, these women whose beauty is going off, that waxlights show
less of Time's ravages than gas or electricity. Candles in the
chandelier; candles in the sconces, candles on the mantelpieces. This
room should be very charming when it is lighted at night."

It was--as he learned later. Just now things not quite so charming
filled the bill, for madame was jeering at him in a manner not to be
understood.

"A police spy--that is what you are, monsieur!" she said, coming up to
him and impudently snapping her fingers under his nose. "Such a fool,
this white-headed old dotard of a Count, to think that he can take me in
with a silly yarn about going to visit a nephew and bringing him back
here to stay. Monsieur, you are a police spy. Well, good luck to you.
Get what the Mauravanian king wants, if--you--can!"

"Madame,"