With modest urging, he soon overcame the Roman firmness of Mademoiselle Euphrosyne, and, wonder of wonders, was honored by an invitation to dine with the austere Genevan maiden. The happy Major was soon triumphant at all points, and Francois was hastily dispatched to the Photographic Atelier to order a half dozen copies of the card portrait which displayed to Alan Hawke the rosebud face of the Veiled Beauty of Delhi. The adventurer made haste to excuse himself for interrupting the flow of the Parnassian stream, and walked backward from the presence of the poor old woman whom he had duped, as if she were a queen. It was an easy matter for the Englishman to waylay and intercept the returning man-at-arms of this castle of cosmopolitan beauty. Francois had duly availed himself of his lengthened absence, and his thick tongue and swimming eye spoke of potations of the Kirsch-wasser dear to the Swiss heart. Major Hawke impressed the servitor with the necessity of bringing the pictures down to his rooms upon the morrow, and then the Major judiciously duplicated his five-franc piece. The happy butler winked with an acute divination of the Major’s purpose and went unsteadily back to the whirlpool of learning. The Major cheerfully went on his own way to meet Miss Genie Forbes, with whom he had established a private understanding as to a runaway visit to the Cathedral, to be followed by an impromptu breakfast. “I can stand the old Gorgon’s dinner,” mused the happy adventurer, “after a tete-a-tete with Miss Genie, and as for Francois, I will also waste a bottle of good Cognac on him. I think that I will start into this strange partnership with a better stock of family history than even this remarkably self-possessed young woman, who seems to be the heiress of some old family vendetta.” The Major laughed as he heard the mills of the gods grinding out a golden grist of the future. But lifted up beyond the impulses of his itching palm the sight of the delicate, girlish face of the Rosebud of Delhi had caused him to dream the strangest dreams. “Why not?” he murmured as he wandered back to the hotel and privately indulged in a petit verre before his rendezvous with Miss Genie, the belle of the West Side. Major Alan Hawke was in “great form” as he piloted the bright-eyed, willful Chicago girl through the dim religious light of the Cathedral. His mocking history of the gay life and racy adventures of Bonnivard, when posing as the rollicking Prior of St. Victor in the wild days of his youth, greatly amused the nervous American heiress. “I should say that he was a holy terror,” laughed Miss Genie, “and I don’t blame the Bishop of Geneva and the Duke of Savoy for making him do his six years in that dark old hole at Chillon! He was a gay boy, you bet, and with his three wives and his lively ways, I reckon the Genevans were blamed sorry they ever let him out. He seems to have been a free thinker, a free liver, and a free lover!”