It was a wonderful sight to witness the combined play of flaming red auras, shot through with vivid flashes like lightning, and blazing jewels. The duel ended with a few scratches, much tearing of gorgeous raiment and disheveled hair. How interesting it was to the mystic to feel the psychology of that crowd, and see the thin veneer of civilization stripped off, leaving nothing but the human tiger and ape. Both ladies were eventually led off the arena by the police, not, be it understood, to the police-station, but to their own sumptuous apartments. All the time they shrieked and chattered like infuriated macaws, and between the shrieks they administered resounding smacks upon the cheeks of their patient escort. Monte Carlo was a wonderful place in those days, in which to study human nature at its best and worst. In latter years it has become meretricious and shabby, and the old magnificence is seen no more. Fifteen to twenty years ago all that was greatest in Europe, Asia, and the Americas, congregated there, and crowned heads mingled freely with the scum of the earth. Constant _habitués_ were the Duchess of Devonshire, and her son, Lord Charles Montague; the Duchess of Montrose, known to the ring at Newmarket as "Bobs," and always the personification, to listen to and look at, of a Thames bargee. Leopold of Belgium, Ferdinand of Bulgaria, Grand Dukes of Russia, potentates from India, all hobnobbing together and gambling heavily. I often wonder now what has befallen those brilliant stars of the half-world firmament. Emmeline d'Alençon with her "bobbed" hair, and her passionate love of animals and birds. The demure Jeanne Ray, who came out every morning to her garden gate, and distributed food to the crowd of paupers and cripples. I have seen peasants kiss the hem of her dress as she walked on an afternoon along the Promenade des Anglais. The beautiful, soulless Mérode, the fierce, stately Otero, and many others who thought nothing of wearing fifty to a hundred thousand pounds' worth of jewels on one evening. Where are they now? If living they are old! Old! a word more dreaded by their class than death. CHAPTER XIII I COMMIT MURDER I will now relate a very unpleasant experience that befell me thirty years ago, but which has by no means exhausted itself in the passage of years. It still, at long intervals, recurs to me as vividly as when first I passed through the painful hours of its unfoldment. It was the month of July, and I was making a tour by road through a portion of Scotland, driving my own horse. I was accompanied by a groom and a maid. One evening we arrived at a well-known inn on Deeside, where I had arranged to pass a couple of nights. I found my room ready for me, an ordinary hotel bedroom, and after supper I retired very early to bed, feeling very sleepy after a long day in the open air.