“Then, my dear sir, you can be perfectly reassured,” the physician briskly concluded, tendering his card. “My professional conscience will not allow me to make even a single future visit, as doctor, to the charming Madame Louison. Should Madame awake in other than her normal health and spirits, I should be professionally at fault.” Major Hawke then led the doctor aside and pressed a five-pound note upon him. “Madame is of a wonderfully strong constitution. An heiress of nature’s choicest favors,” the happy Galen floridly said, as he took his leave. “So she is,” grimly assented Hawke. The gossipy boniface was already spreading such meager details of the sudden seizure as he had been able to pick up, and, the words “Polish noblewoman,” “Italian marchesa,” “French countess,” were tossed about freely in the light froth of the conversation in the ladies’ drawing-room. Meanwhile, Alan Hawke was smoking a meditative cigar alone, while pacing the old Cantonal high road before the Faucon. “I think I will remain on picket here,” he mused. “This fiddler fellow, Wieniawski, must not meet her. She must be led on to leave here at once. Constitution, nerve, aplomb; she has them all. She should have been born a man. What a soldier! One of nature’s mistakes--man’s mental organization, woman’s soft, flooding emotions, and beauty’s fiery passions.” “I must pump Casimir. He will be safely nailed to the platform by his duties, from eight to ten. I will not leave her a moment, however, till he has the baton in his hand. I will then watch him until ten--meet him down there, and, if he meets her after we separate for the night, he is a smarter Pole than I take him for. And now I must go and frighten her away from here.” Major Hawke was quick to note all the outer indications of man’s varying fortunes. He had so long buffeted the waves of adversity himself that he was a past master of the art of measuring the depth of a hidden purse. He recalled the brilliant Casimir Wieniawski of eight years past--the curled darling of the hot-hearted ladies of Calcutta, Madras, Bombay and Singapore. In a glance of cursory inspection Alan Hawke had noted the doubtful gloss of the dress suit; it was the polish of long wear, not the velvety glow of newness. There was a growing bald spot, scarcely hidden by the Hyperion Polish curls; there were crows’-feet around the bold, insolent eyes, and the man’s smile was lean and wolfish when the glittering white teeth flashed through the professional smirk of the traveling artist. The old, easy assurance was still there, but cognac had dulled the fires of genius; the tones of the violin trembled, even under the weakening but still magic fingers, and the splendid sapphire and diamond cluster ring of old was replaced by a too evident Palais Royal work of inferior art.