There was coffee in the grate kept hot by means of a spirit lamp. Mrs. May poured out a cup and handed it to her guest. She lay back in her chair watching him with a keen glance and the easy, natural insolence, the cruel cutting superiority of the great over the small. The man stood, his hands thrust into the folds of his loose sleeves, a picture of patient resignation. "How did you get here?" the princess asked. "At the great house in London I asked, O mistress," Ben Heer replied. "I came over, as thou knowest, to do certain work. There was yet another one with me. And when my work was done I came on to tell what thy slave had accomplished." "You have proofs of what you say?" "Else I had not been here. For two years we have followed up the track of the victim. It was as if we had searched for one single perch in the whole of a great lake of water. But we never tired and never slept both at the same time. Then at last we got near, and it came to the knowledge of the prey that we were upon him. That was long before the last cold weather that nearly starved us." The man paused and shivered. The princess nodded with careless sympathy. She had never tried a winter in England, but she could imagine what it was. "He knew us at last," Ben Heer resumed. "He met us face to face in the public street, and he knew that his hour had come. A night later he was in Paris. At the same time we were in Paris also. He tried Rome, Vienna, Berlin. So did we. Then he came back to London again. When he did so we knew that he had bowed his face before the All-seeing, and prayed that the end might come speedily." The princess followed all this with impatience. But the man was speaking after the manner of his kind and could not be hurried. He would go on to the end without omitting a single detail and the princess was forced to listen. Despite the Western garb and the evidences of Western life and custom about her, she was no longer Mrs. May, but Princess Zara. She had only to close her eyes and the droning intonation and passionless voice of the speaker took her back to Lassa again. And the day was near, ah! the day was near, when the goal would be reached. "Once we had him and once he escaped," Ben Heer went on. "He was a brave man was Voski, and nothing could break down those nerves of iron. He knew that the end was near. It was in a big house--a house near to London--that we found him. "There were servants, and they were glad to have their fortunes told. It was their evening meal on the table when we got there, and the man Voski Sahib was out. Then, behold, after that evening meal the servants slept till the dawn, and at midnight the master returned. He came into his study and the bright flash of the lightning came at the touch of his fingers." "Electric light," the princess said impatiently. "Go on."