With a sudden motion of her hand to Jules, Alixe Delavigne leaned back, half fainting, upon her cushions. Her agitated heart was now beating in a wild tumult of rage and baffled hatred! “Home!” she cried, and then, as the marble house was lost to view, she harshly cried: “To Ram Lal’s first! To the jewel store!” There was a brooding death in her eyes when she sternly said to the merchant: “Send him to me at once! Send Hawke! Go! Waste not a moment!” And then she swore an oath of vengeance, which would have made Hugh Fraser Johnstone shudder, as he sat drinking champagne cup with his guest. “One for you, my lady!” he had laughed, grimly, as the woman whom he had tricked drove swiftly away. And the grim fates laughed too, spinning at a shortening life web. Major Alan Hawke was interrupted in his cosy nest at the Club by the hasty advent of Ram Lal. The old jeweler had for once abandoned all his Oriental calm, and he trembled as he muttered. “She demands you at once. I brought my own carriage. Go to her quickly. There will be a great monsoon of quarrel now. But her face looks as if she was stricken to the death, and something will come of all this. You must watch like the crouching cheetah!” “What has happened?” anxiously cried Hawke. “She has just found out the women are gone! She went up to the marble house this afternoon, and saw the old Sahib Johnstone. He did not even bid her to leave her carriage. One of my men ran over at once and told me. She drove to the shop on her way homeward and sent me here.” The black Son of Plutus scuttled away, as if in a mortal fear. “I do not dare to face her--in her angry mood,” was Ram’s last word. He was only accustomed to baby-faced Hindu women of the “langorous lily” type, who hung on his every word--the mute slaves of his jaded passions. “This one is a tigress!” he sighed, as he fled from the Club. “Ah! My lady is a bit rattled,” mused Hawke as the carriage sped along. “Now is the time to catch her off her guard.” And so he made himself sleek and patient, with the surface varnish of his “society manner,” when Jules Victor, with semi-hostile eyes, ushered him into the presence of Alixe Delavigne, still in her robes of “visitation splendor.” “What is this devil’s work done in my absence? This spiriting away of Nadine!” cried Alixe, grasping Hawke’s wrist with a nervous clasp, which made the strong man wince. “This juggling in my absence?” Her eyes were sternly fixed on him in dawning suspicions.