That faithful servitor appeared on the instant, his face alight with anticipation. "But if there should be a plot!" protested Tellier, hesitating, even yet, on the threshold. "If there is a plot," said the Prince, sternly, "someone shall suffer for it, depend upon that! But against gentlemen, the proof must be conclusive. Glück, show him out," and he shut the door upon the unhappy spy. "It would have been well," observed Glück, calmly, coming back after a moment, "to have thrown him out in the first place." "I agree with you," said his master. "You may do so whenever you find him here again, my friend," and for an instant Glück almost smiled. "Will Your Highness dine in your apartment tonight?" he asked. The Prince hesitated; then his face relaxed as at some pleasant thought. "No, Glück," he said, "I will dine downstairs. Get my bath ready." CHAPTER IX Pelletan's Skeleton As he left the dining-room that evening, Rushford crooked an imperious finger at Monsieur Pelletan. "I want a word with you," he said in his ear. "In private, monsieur?" asked the little Frenchman, with some trepidation. "Yes, I think it would better be in private--that is, if you can accomplish it in this bedlam." "Oh, I haf a place, monsieur, where no one will intrude," and Pelletan led the way through the hotel office to a little door back of the desk. "T'is iss my--vat you call eet in English?--my sty, my kennel--" "Your den." "Iss t'ere a difference?" asked Pelletan, fumbling with the lock. "A sty is for pigs and a kennel for dogs," Rushford explained. "A den is for wild beasts. These niceties of the English language are not for you, Pelletan." "Still," persisted Pelletan, "a man iss no more a wild beast t'an he iss a dog or a pig." "Not nearly so much so, very often," agreed Rushford, heartily. "You have me there, Pelletan. Sty would undoubtedly be the right word in many cases." "Fery well, t'en," said Pelletan, proudly, opening the door, "pehold my sty!" and he stood aside that his companion might enter. It was a little square box of a room jammed with such a litter of bric-à-brac as is to be picked up only on the boulevards--trifles in Bohemian glass, a lizard stuffed with straw, carved fragments of jade and ivory, a Sèvres vase bearing the portrait of Du Barry, an Indian chibook, a pink-cheeked Dresden shepherdess, a sabre of the time of Napoleon, a leering Hindoo idol, a hideous dragon in Japanese bronze grimacing furiously at a Barye lion--all of them huddled together without order or arrangement, as they would have been in an auction room or an antique shop. In one corner stood a low table of Italian mosaic, bearing a somewhat battered statuette of Saint Geneviève plying her distaff, and the walls were fairly covered with photographs-- photographs, for the most part, of women more anxious to display their charms of person to an admiring world than to observe the rigour of convention.