Opera" on the corner.

The artful Einstein was warily assuring himself that he was quite
unknown to the convives before making his report to his real master
and evil genius. For, young as he was, Emil Einstein well knew that
the tyrant master, who had been his mother's cruel lover, might
some day lure him on to the electric chair.

A guilty pride thrilled the depraved boy's heart to feel that he,
alone, in all the crowded ward, knew what manner of human devil
lurked behind those innocent-looking blue spectacles.

He had seen the ferocious grin which relaxed Fritz Braun's bearded
lips into a cruel grin, as the sly lad made a gesture which
indicated tidings of great joy. Einstein's dress and bearing was
fully worthy of his respectable business station. He might well be
taken for the precious "only son" of some well-to-do Jewish-American
merchant.

Quick to learn, he had aped the mien of his American fellow
employees, and his "educational evenings" at the "Irving Place,"
the "Thalia," and the "Germania" had given to his bearing what he
fondly deemed an "irresistible social swing."

Greedy of pleasures, gluttonous and covetous, the young Ishmael
ardently looked forward to a comfortable ill-gotten revenue at the
hands of the man, who--through a skilful manipulation of the German
janitor of the Western Trading Company's office--had obtained the
place of office boy, "with substantial references," for the son of
his cast-off paramour.

Leah Einstein had long forgotten the face of the reckless Polish
country noble who was the real father of this budding criminal, and
the lad himself but dimly discerned the drift of his Mephistophelian
patron's proposed villainy.

Timid and cowardly at heart, the young waif would have shuddered
had he known of the callous-handed and desperate murders which had
shocked Vienna just before Hugo Landor, a talented and handsome
young chemist, disappeared forever in flight, lost under a cloud
of scandal caused by drink and a maddening devotion to a baby-faced
devil of the Ring Strasse Theater chorus, a woman at whose
feet the hungry-eyed aristocrats had knelt to sue, a man-eater, a
hard-hearted, velvet-eyed, reckless and defiant devil.

At an almost imperceptible nod Einstein drew near to his patron,
taking the vacant place in the little alcove, a deux, with his
back prudently screening him from any chance visitor who might know
the Western Trading Company's personnel. Braun was eager for