that I can promise you immunity from that annoying complaint for the
rest of your life."

"You are doing your best," Peter declared, leaning back in his chair,
"to take away my appetite."

Bernadine looked searchingly from one to the other of his two guests.

"Yes," he admitted, "you are brave men. I do not know why I should ever
have doubted it. Your pose is excellent. I have no wish, however, to see
you buoyed up by a baseless optimism. A somewhat remarkable chance has
delivered you into my hands. You are my prisoners. You, Peter Baron de
Grost, I have hated all my days. You have stood between me and the
achievement of some of my most dearly cherished tasks. Always I have
said to myself that the day of reckoning must come. It has arrived. As
for you, Marquis de Sogrange, if my personal feelings towards you are
less violent, you still represent the things absolutely inimical to me
and my interests. The departure of you two men was the one thing
necessary for the successful completion of certain tasks which I have in
hand at the present moment."

Peter pushed away his plate.

"You have succeeded in destroying my appetite, Count," he declared. "Now
that you have gone so far in expounding your amiable resolutions towards
us, perhaps you will go a little farther and explain exactly how, in
this eminently respectable house, situated, I understand, in an
eminently respectable neighbourhood, with a police station within a
mile, and a dozen or so witnesses as to our present whereabouts, you
intend to expedite our removal?"

Bernadine pointed towards the woman who sat facing him.

"Ask the Baroness how these things are arranged."

They turned towards her. She fell back in her chair with a little gasp.
She had fainted. Bernadine shrugged his shoulders. The butler and one of
the footmen, who during the whole of the conversation had stolidly
proceeded with their duties, in obedience to a gesture from their
master, took her up in their arms and carried her from the room.

"The fear has come to her, too," Bernadine murmured softly. "It may come
to you, my brave friends, before morning."

"It is possible," Peter answered, his hand stealing round to his hip
pocket, "but in the meantime, what is to prevent----"

The hip pocket was empty. Peter's sentence ended abruptly. Bernadine
mocked him.

"To prevent your shooting me in cold blood, I suppose," he remarked.
"Nothing except that my servants are too clever. No one save