rk in
order to marry a wretched little French adventurer named Jean de
Courtois, and it is absolutely essential, for her own welfare, not to
mention other considerations, that the wedding, which is to take place
to-night, shall be prevented. Two European consuls and several
important men in your own city have helped me to land this evening from
a vessel which will not disembark her passengers till the morning.
Therefore, it is fairly obvious that you run several sorts of risk by
refusing to help me in finding my daughter, and I can hardly believe
that you know nothing about her movements. . . . Come, my man, don't
be both a fool and a knave, but speak!"

Rafferty, who had calmed down during this impressive harangue, took
thought, and did speak.

"If yer friend had said half as much, my lord, I'd have made him wise
straight away," he answered. "Miss Grandison went off at 8.30 in a
taxi with her maid, Marcelle Leroux, and a strange gentleman who
certainly wasn't Mr. de Courtois, my lord. They wanted to find out
where a clergyman lived, an' I couldn't tell them--not about the
Protestant Episcopal, I mean, my lord--but the driver of the taxi
remembered that there was a minister of that persuasion living in 56th
Street, near 7th Avenue, an' next door to a church. So they made a
bee-line that-a-way, my lord, an' I went to see to the furnace, an'
that's all there is to it, my lord."

"You say the man was not de Courtois?" queried the Earl impatiently.

"I'm sure he wasn't the man who has passed under that name hereabouts
nearly every day for a month, my lord," said Rafferty.

"Oh, some fellow of his own kidney he has hired to assist him," put in
Vassilan, who held fast to that theory, in part, even after he had been
painfully disillusioned as to other parts of it. "Come quickly now,
you, and tell our chauffeur where to take us."

If Rafferty had dared, he would have given the chauffeur directions
likely to lead to further bickering, but the presence of the Earl
restrained him, for Valletort, though thin and hawk-nosed, was an
aristocrat in every inch, whereas Count Ladislas Vassilan wore the
stage aspect of a successful pork-butcher. So he explained matters to
the chauffeur, yet smiled grimly when the automobile wheeled away
almost in the very tracks of Curtis's taxi.

"Who sez there's no such thing as luck?" he chuckled. "That valve knew
what it was about when it stuck, an' my name ain't what it is if that
we