“A clever man—who relies upon the accident of papers. My dear friend, would all the books in our great library in Rome save you from yonder men if I raised my voice to call them? Come, Dr. Fabos, you are either a fool or a hero. You hunt me, Valentine Imroth, whom the police of twenty cities have hunted in vain. You visit us as a schoolboy might have done, and yet you are as well acquainted with your responsibilities as I am. What shall I say of you? What do you say of yourself when you ask the question, ‘Will these men let me go free? Will they permit my yacht to make Europe again?’ Allow me to answer that, and in my turn I will tell you why you stand here safe beside me when at a word of mine, at a nod, one of these white doors would open and you would be but a little whiff of ashes before a man could number ten. No, my friend; I do not understand you. Some day I shall do so—and then God help you!” It was wonderful to hear how little there was either of vain boasting or of melodramatic threat in this strange confession. The revolting hawk-eyed Jew put his cards upon the table just as frankly as any simpering miss might have done. I perplexed him, therefore he let me live. My own schemes were so many childish imaginings to be derided. The yacht, Europe, the sealed papers which would tell my story when they were opened—he thought that he might mock them as a man mocks an enemy who has lost his arms by the way. In this, however, I perceived that I must now undeceive him. The time had come to play my own cards—the secret cards which not even his wit had brought into our reckoning. “Herr Imroth,” I said quietly, “whether you understand me or no is the smallest concern to me. Why I came to Santa Maria, you will know in due season. Meanwhile, I have a little information for your ear and for your ear alone. There is in Paris, Rue Gloire de Marie, number twenty, a young woman of the name of——” I paused, for the light, shining anew, showed me upon the old man’s face something I would have paid half my fortune to see there. Fear, and not fear alone: dread, and yet something more than dread:—human love, inhuman passion, the evil spirit of all malice, all desire, all hate. How these emotions fired those limpid eyes, drew down the mouth in passion, set the feeble limbs trembling. And the cry that escaped his lips—the shriek of terror almost, how it resounded in the silence of the night!—the cry of a wolf mourning a cub, of a jackal robbed of a prey. Never have my ears heard such sounds or my soul revolted before such temper. “Devil,” he cried. “Devil of hell, what have you to do with her?” I clutched his arm and drew him down toward me: “Life for a life. Shall she know the truth of this old man’s story, the old man who goes to her as a husband clad in benevolence and well-doing? Shall she know the truth, or shall my friends in Paris keep silence? Answer, old man, or, by God, they shall tell it to her to-morrow.”