“She is too smart for us, as yet,” soothingly said Ram Lal. “But wait; wait till they return! Pay me well and I will find out all that goes on. I can always get into the marble house at night. At any time, I may spy on old Johnstone and get the secret there. I have a couple of men of my own in his house. They know where to leave a door, a window, an opened sash for me. And at the Silver Bungalow, I can go in and out secretly by day and night. She would not know. You would not wish anything to happen to her?” The old jewel merchant’s voice was darkly suggestive. “No! Devil take her!” cried Hawke. “What I want to know is hidden in her crafty head and stony heart. Death would bury it forever. Nothing must happen either to her or to him. It would spoil the whole game. Don’t you see, Ram Lal, there’s money in this for you and me just as long as we keep them all here under our hands. If they separate--even if one goes to Europe--you can watch one and I the other. You can always frighten money out of old Johnstone if we tell each other all, and I can follow that woman over Europe and dog her till she is driven crazy. She will fear me just as long as old Hugh Johnstone is alive, for I could sell her out to him. No one else cares. They must both live to be our bankers. Now tell me, why did either or both of them go to Calcutta--what for?” Ram Lal figuratively washed his hands in invisible water. “Running water, passing silently, leaves no story behind, Sahib,” he said, simply. “We have not caught our eels yet. But they are both coming back into our eel pot.” And as the days dragged on Alan Hawke beguiled the time with the most energetic inroads into Justine Delande’s heart. “Some one must break the line of the enemy,” darkly mused Alan Hawke, as in the unrestrained intimacy of their long, morning rides, he influenced the Swiss woman’s heart, love-tortured, to a greater passionate surrender. “It maybe all in all to me, in my secret career, your future fidelity,” he pleaded. ‘“It will be all in all to you, and to your sister. There will be your home, the friendship of an enormously rich woman! The girl will have a million pounds! And you and I, Justine, shall not be cast off, as one throws away an old sandal.” The cowering woman clung closer daily to the man who now molded her will to his own. The absence of Johnstone and Madame Louison seemed confirmation of the rumors of coming bridals. “They will come back, as man and wife!” growled old Verner, to Captain Hardwicke, “and then, look out for a second bridal! Hawke and the heiress!” But Harry Hardwicke only smiled and bided his time. His daily morning ride led him to the double gateway, to at least nearby the isolation of the lovely Rose who was filling his heart with all beauty and brightness.