It was to our private apartments that we turned when we left the shop in the Graben, and began to see how we stood. So far, fortune was with us. We had found the diamond, we had caught our man. If all went well we might settle with King on the following evening, and be off to Paris again by the midnight train. And if it turned out like that, I knew that we should carry away five thousand apiece as the profit of the venture.
You may imagine that the next twenty-four hours were anxious ones. I went up to the Métropole in the morning and engaged a room in the name of Sir Nicolas Steele, saying that he would dine at the hotel with his friend, the Comte de Laon. That carried out our idea of having two names in Vienna. If any one said to Sir Nicolas, "You are not the Comte de Laon," he had only to point to me; if any one said to me, "You are not Sir Nicolas Steele," I had only to point to my master. For the matter of that, a big hotel is far too busy looking after its guests to be bothering about the identity of people; and no one asked me a single question when I booked the room and ordered the dinner, to which we had already invited Benjamin King, the bacon merchant.
Punctually at seven o'clock that night the three of us sat down to table—Sir Nicolas, King, and myself. My master was clever enough to monopolize most of the conversation, giving it out that I spoke French only; and lucky for me, King's daughter, a pretty little thing I'd seen in Paris, had gone off to the
