Major Hawke shook his head. “You may rely on me to meet you, and to faithfully obey you,” he gravely said. There were unspoken words trembling on his lips, which he fain would have uttered. “By Heavens! She is a witch!” he murmured, in a repressed excitement, as he walked quietly down the hallway to keep his tryst with Casimir Wieniawski. For Berthe Louison had at once divined the cause of his unrest. “You think that I should tell you more? Why should I tell you anything? We are strangers yet, not even friends. You may divine that I trust no man. I have had my own sad lessons of life-lessons learned in bitterness and tears. I go out to your burning jungle land, with neither hope to allure, nor fear to repel. The whole world is the same to me. That I have a purpose, I admit; and even you may know me better by and bye! Till then, no professions, no promises, no pledges. I use you for my own selfish purposes, that is all; and you can frankly study your own self-interest. We are two clay jars swept along down the Ganges of life. For a few threads of the dark river’s current, we travel on, side by side! You have frankly taken me at my word! I have taken you at yours! There is a written order to settle my affairs and remove my luggage. Of course, should you meet with any accident, telegraph to the Vittorio Emmanuele, at Brindisi. Money,” she said, almost bitterly, “would be telegraphed; and so, I say”--he listened breathlessly--“au revoir--at Brindisi!” she concluded, giving him her hand, with a frank smile. As Alan Hawke descended the stair, he growled. “A woman without a heart, and--not without a head!” As he calmly answered the manager’s polite inquiry for Madame’s health, the “heartless woman” whom he had left was lying sobbing in the dark room above--crying, in her anguish, “Valerie! My poor, dead Valerie! I go to your child!” But, none suspected her departure, when the trimly-clad woman glided out of the entrance of the Hotel Faucon, at eleven o’clock. The maid was in waiting on the circular place in front with a carriage, and the key of the apartment lay in a sealed envelope on Alan Hawke’s table, which proves that a few francs are just as potent in Switzerland as the same number of shillings in London, or dollars in New York. It was a clear case of “stole away.” When Major Alan Hawke leaned over the supper table at the Casino, pledging Madame Frangipanni’s bright eyes in very fair cafe champagne, he nervously started as he heard the wailing whistle and clanging bells of the through train for Constance. He forgot the faded complexion, the worn face, the chemically tinted hair and haggard eyes of the broken-down Austrian blonde concert singer, in the exhilaration of Berthe Louison’s departure.