an awkward, aggrieved
bow. It was a scene characteristic of the end of the nineteenth
century--an overfed, commonplace, pursy little man who had been born in
a Brixton semi-detached villa, and whose highest idea of pleasure was
a Sunday up the river in an expensive electric launch, confronting and
utterly routing, in a hotel belonging to an American millionaire, the
representative of a race of men who had fingered every page of European
history for centuries, and who still, in their native castles, were
surrounded with every outward circumstance of pomp and power.

'Aribert,' said Prince Eugen, a little later, 'you were right. It is all
over. I have only one refuge--'

'You don't mean--' Aribert stopped, dumbfounded.

'Yes, I do,' he said quickly. 'I can manage it so that it will look like
an accident.'

Chapter Twenty-One THE RETURN OF FELIX BABYLON

ON the evening of Prince Eugen's fateful interview with Mr Sampson Levi,
Theodore Racksole was wandering somewhat aimlessly and uneasily about
the entrance hail and adjacent corridors of the Grand Babylon. He had
returned from Ostend only a day or two previously, and had endeavoured
with all his might to forget the affair which had carried him there--to
regard it, in fact, as done with. But he found himself unable to do so.
In vain he remarked, under his breath, that there were some things which
were best left alone: if his experience as a manipulator of markets, a
contriver of gigantic schemes in New York, had taught him anything
at all, it should surely have taught him that. Yet he could not feel
reconciled to such a position. The mere presence of the princes in his
hotel roused the fighting instincts of this man, who had never in his
whole career been beaten. He had, as it were, taken up arms on their
side, and if the princes of Posen would not continue their own battle,
nevertheless he, Theodore Racksole, wanted to continue it for them. To a
certain extent, of course, the battle had been won, for Prince Eugen had
been rescued from an extremely difficult and dangerous position, and the
enemy--consisting of Jules, Rocco, Miss Spencer, and perhaps others--had
been put to flight. But that, he conceived, was not enough; it was very
far from being enough. That the criminals, for criminals they decidedly
were, should still be at large, he regarded as an absurd anomaly. And
there was another point: he had said nothing to the police of all that
had occurred. He