The girl never flinched. “Make the best of a bad job, Grundt,” she said. “Leave things as they are and return to Germany and you will hear no word from us to dispute or disprove any story you like to tell those who sent you. I repeat: You can kill us, you can torture us, but you’ll never recover the jewels. Make up your mind to that and go—while you can!” The hairy hand that clutched the pistol faltered and slowly dropped to the cripple’s side. Of a sudden he seemed to have grown older. For a full minute he stood and glowered at Desmond—the girl he ignored. As the two men faced each other, it seemed to the Englishman as though the scroll of the years were unrolled and that, like him, Grundt was telling over in his mind the many bouts which these two had fought out between them. Then slowly, listlessly, the great hand went up and he thrust the Browning into his breast pocket. “I told your Chief, Okewood,” he said in his deep, stern voice, “that this would be my last case. Though he has taken this trick, I think I may let my decision stand. But tell him this from me—that, though he has gained this trick, he has not won the game. The cards have been against me throughout. I have played a losing hand, dealt me by the blinded, besotted fools”—his voice hissed with anger—“who, in overthrowing my master, destroyed our country. But do not forget that in politics nothing is stable, that the enemies of to-day may be the friends of to-morrow, and vice versa, Okewood—vice versa!” He broke off, and for an instant the dark, expressive eyes rested on the young man’s face. “Do not fall into the error of believing that I am grown sentimental in my old age, my young friend,” he resumed. “I have always been a Realpolitiker, and in this instance I have bowed my head to the unanswerable logic of your companion just as in different circumstances, should my interest, or the interest of those I serve, have required it, I should have had no hesitation in putting the pair of you to death. Your luck is in to-night, Herr Major. You can tell your Chief that you owe your life to a woman’s tongue!” On that he turned and left them, and limped, a lonely defiant figure, to the door, where the night received him and swallowed him up. “My dear,” cried Desmond when the door had closed behind him, “you’re a marvel! In all the years I’ve known him such a thing has never happened before. You beat him fair and square! It was like a miracle the way you laid him low! How on earth did you come to think of it?” “The man’s a mass of vanity like the rest of you,” little Miss Brewster ejaculated scornfully. “A little knowledge, a little intuition, a little bluff”—she smiled rather wanly. “You men take each other too seriously, anyway . . .” “But what has become of the chamois leather packet with the jewels?” demanded Desmond.