will send him to the guillotine.”
Saulomon stood up. His eyes were brilliant, he smoothed at his pale hair, and suddenly he laughed.
“It was admirable, M. le prefect. Well!” He glanced towards the policeman in the doorway.
“I could kill you, Bencolin,” said Villon venomously. “If for nothing else, I could kill you for that absurd masquerading as a ghost. Why? Why must you look in and scare everybody to death?”
“That statement,” said Bencolin, “is not flattering. Besides, I did not have my nose chopped off; I merely pressed it against the glass.” He contemplated the speechless Miss Mertz, raised his eyebrows, and chuckled faintly. “Give me pardon for a little curiosity, my friend. I wanted to see whether Miss Brunhilde Mertz had succeeded in getting through the French customs the one of Mercier’s diamonds which she had bought from Mr. Depping in London.”
V
Bencolin and Sir John Landervorne left Villon’s office in the Quai d’Orsay. There had been a somewhat hectic scene, in which Miss Mertz was remembered to have struck somebody with an umbrella. In the midst of it Sir John remembered most distinctly Saulomon’s tall, pale figure standing unmoved among the shadows, on his face a dim smile of wonderment and pity.
Muffled in their greatcoats, Bencolin and Sir John crossed over and stood by the embankment at the river. A faint snow hovered in the air, like a reflection of the weird pale carpet of light which flickered on the dark water, and, beyond, on the dull shine of the Place de la Concorde. A necklace of lamps on a soft bosom which shivered with the cold; windy spaces and low gray buildings, twinkling, muttering; the lighted arch of the bridges; farther on, the closed bookstalls where
