particular respect. It rendered one's pet
project much too difficult of execution. Earnestly as one desired to
have a look at the inside of that house without the knowledge of its
inmates, its aspect was forbidding and discouraging in the utmost
extreme.

Heavy gates of wrought bronze guarded the front doors. The single side
or service-door was similarly protected if more simply. And stout
grilles of bronze barred every window on the level of the street.

Now none of these could have withstood the attack of a man of ingenuity
with a little time at his disposal. But Lanyard could count on only the
few remaining minutes of true night. Retarded though it might be by
shrouded skies, dawn must come all too soon for his comfort. Yet he was
conscious of no choice in the matter: he must and in spite of
everything would know to-night what was going on behind that blank
screen of stone. To-morrow night would be too late. Tonight, if there
were any warrant for his suspicions, the jewels of Eve de Montalais lay
in the dwelling of Liane Delorme; or if they were not there, the secret
of their hiding was. But to-morrow both, and more than likely Liane as
well, would be on the wing; or Lanyard had been sorely mistaken in
seeing in her as badly frightened a woman as he had ever known, when
she had learned of the assassination of de Lorgnes.

It was possible, he thought it extremely probable, that Liane Delorme
was as powerful as Athenais Reneaux had asserted; influential, that is,
with the State, with the dealers in its laws and the dispensers of its
protection. But now she had not to reckon with such as these, but with
enemies of her own sort, with an antagonism as reckless of law and
order as she herself. And she was afraid of that, infinitely more
disturbed in mind and spirit than she would have been in the face of
any threat on the part of the police. The Prefecture was a known and
measured force, an engine that ran as it were on mapped lines of rail;
its moves might be forecast, guarded against, watched, evaded. But this
other force worked in the dark, this hostile power personified in the
creature who had called himself Albert Dupont; the very composition of
its being was cloaked in a secrecy impenetrable and terrifying, its
intentions and its workings could not be surmised or opposed until it
struck and the success or failure of the stroke revealed its origin and
aim.

Liane--or one misjudged her--would never sit still and w