nssen Pullaine, and if you had not so successfully hidden your real
name under that of your professional one, no doubt some of your
colleagues would have put you in the way of finding it out long ago. The
baron did not go back on his word and did not act ungratefully. His
will, dated twenty-nine years ago, was never altered in a single
particular. I rather suspect that that letter and that gift of money
which came to you in the name of his steward, and was supposed to close
the affair entirely, was the work of his nephew, the gentleman whose
exit has just been made. A crafty individual that, chevalier, and he
laid his plans cleverly and well. Who would be likely to connect him
with the death of a beast-tamer in a circus, who had perished in what
would appear an accident of his calling? Ah, yes, the lion's smile was a
clever idea. He was a sharp rascal to think of it."

"Sir! You--you do not mean to tell me that he caused that? He never went
near the beast--never--even once."

"Not necessary, chevalier. He kept near you and your children; that was
all that he needed to do to carry out his plan. The lion was as much his
victim as anybody else. What it did it could not help doing. The very
simplicity of the plan was its passport to success. All that was
required was the unsuspected sifting of snuff on the hair of the person
whose head was to be put in the beast's mouth. The lion's smile was not,
properly speaking, a smile at all, chevalier; it was the torture which
came of snuff getting into its nostrils, and when the beast made that
uncanny noise and snapped its jaws together, it was simply the outcome
of a sneeze. The thing would be farcical if it were not that tragedy
hangs on the thread of it, and that a life, a useful human life, was
destroyed by means of it. Yes, it was clever, it was diabolically
clever; but you know what Bobby Burns says about the best-laid schemes
of mice and men. There's always a Power higher up that works the ruin of
them."

With that he walked by and, going to young Scarmelli, put out his hand.

"You're a good chap and you've got a good girl, so I expect you will be
happy," he said; and then lowered his voice so that the rest might not
reach the chevalier's ears. "You were wrong to suspect the little
stepmother," he added. "She's true blue, Scarmelli. She was only playing
up to those fellows because she was afraid the 'senor' would drop out
and close the show if she didn't, and that she and