"You are right," cried the major. "His wife's diary will have given that cursed Frenchman a glimpse of the truth; and that piece of shell in his possession is a proof to him that his wife is perhaps still alive, which is the one thing I wanted to avoid. We shall never get rid of him now!" His rage seemed to increase. "Oh, Karl, he makes me sick and tired! He and his street-boy of a brother-in-law, what a pair of swankers! By God, I did think that you had rid me of them the night when we came back to their room at the château and found their names written on the wall! And you can understand that they won't let things rest, now that they know the girl isn't dead! They will look for her. They will find her. And, as she knows all our secrets . . . ! You ought to have made away with her, Karl!" "And the prince?" chuckled the spy. "Conrad is an ass! The whole of that family will bring us ill-luck and first of all to him who was fool enough to fall in love with that hussy. You ought to have made away with her at once, Karl--I told you--and not to have waited for the prince's return." Standing full in the light as he was, Major Hermann displayed the most appalling highwayman's face imaginable, appalling not because of the deformity of the features or any particular ugliness, but because of the most repulsive and savage expression, in which Paul once more recognized, carried to the very limits of paroxysm, the expression of the Comtesse Hermine, as revealed in her picture and the photograph. At the thought of the crime which had failed, Major Hermann seemed to suffer a thousand deaths, as though the murder had been a condition of his own life. He ground his teeth. He rolled his bloodshot eyes. In a distraught voice, clutching the shoulder of his accomplice with his fingers, he shouted, this time in French: "Karl, it is beginning to look as though we couldn't touch them, as though some miracle protected them against us. You've missed them three times lately. At the Château d'Ornequin you killed two others in their stead. I also missed him the other day at the little gate in the park. And it was in the same park, near the same chapel--you remember--sixteen years ago, when he was only a child, that you drove your knife into him. . . . Well, you started your blundering on that day." The spy gave an insolent, cynical laugh: "What did you expect, _Excellenz_? I was on the threshold of my career and I had not your experience. Here were a father and a little boy whom we had never set eyes on ten minutes before and who had done nothing to us except annoy the Kaiser. My hand shook, I confess. You, on the other hand: ah, you made neat work of the father, you did! One little touch of your little hand and the trick was done!"