Hardened as he was, Alan Hawke was surprised at the childlike lightness of the Pole’s manner when they encountered the fresh young beauties who were already the cynosure of all eyes upon the morning boat. The storm of emotion had spent itself, and while Alan Hawke squired, the aggressive Miss Genie, Casimir Wieniawski was bending over the slightly dreamy and more romantic Miss Phenie! They distributed themselves in open order, as they strolled along toward the drawbridge of that most hospitable of old horrors, Chillon Castle. It was a day of days, and the artful Hawke laughed as he smoked his cigar upon a rustic bench in the castle Garden. Miss Genie was at his side, pouting, petulant, provokingly pretty and duly agnostic as to the Polish prince. A week later, Alan Hawke stood on the deck of the Sepoy, as that reliable vessel steamed out of Brindisi harbor for Bombay. He was watching a lace handkerchief, waved by a graceful woman, standing alone upon the pier. The adventurer drew a silver rupee from his pocket, and then gayly tossed it into the waves, crying, “Here’s for luck!” as he watched the slender, distant, womanly figure move up the pier. There lay the Empress of India with steam now curling from her stacks, ready to follow on to Calcutta. “I have not broken her lines yet,” murmured Major Hawke as he paced the deck, “but I have her pretty well surrounded, cunning as she is!” and so he complacently ordered his first bottle of pale ale. CHAPTER IV. THE VEILED ROSEBUD OF DELHI The October winds were whirling the pine needles down the mountain defiles in the bracing Alpine autumn, as Alan Hawke sped on past Suez, gliding on through the stifling furnace heat of the Red Sea, past Mocha, and dashing along through the Bridge of Tears, to Aden. He left at Suez, and also at the Eastern Gibraltar of haughty Albion, the brief letters for his mysterious employer, and he mentally arranged the social gambit of his reappearance at Delhi in the nine days before the Sepoy steamed into the island-dotted bay of Bombay. Sternly shunning, on his arrival, the local sirens, whose songs of old fell so sweetly upon his ear, the determined Major sped away at once for Allahabad. He was on shaking social quagmires at Bombay. There were sundry little threads of the past still left hanging out in the shape of stray urban indebtedness, and he now scorned to throw away a single one of the crisp Bank of England notes showered upon him by Fortune. He was growing sadly wise. He had lately mused over the old motto, “Lucky at cards--unlucky in love!” The cool provision of the funds at Lausanne by Berthe Louison, her separate route to Delhi, her business-like coldness in their strangely frank relations, all these things proved to him that he was to be only an intelligent tool; not a trusted friend in the little drama about to open at the old capital of Oude.