hotel and the Count proposed an hour's repose "de
travail."

"There is no message from your friend," he said candidly, "no doubt your
telegram has troubled him. Perhaps we shall get it by dinner-time. You
must be very tired and perhaps you would like to lie down."

Alban did not demur and he went to his own room, and taking off his
boots he lay upon his bed and quickly fell fast asleep. Count Sergius,
however, had no intention of doing any such thing. He was closeted with
the Chief of the Police ten minutes after they had returned, and in
twenty he had come to a resolution.

"This young Englishman will meet the girl Lois Boriskoff to-morrow
morning," he said. "Arrest the pair of them and let me know when it is
done. But mind you--treat him as though he were your own son. I have my
reasons."

The Chief merely bowed. He quite understood that such a man as Sergius
Zamoyski would have very good reasons indeed.

CHAPTER XXIV

THE DAWN OF THE DAY

Count Sergius believed that he had settled the affaire Gessner when he
gave his instructions to the Chief of the Police, and the subsequent
hours found him exceedingly pleased with himself. An artist in his
profession, he flattered himself that it had all come about in the
manner of his own anticipations and that he would be able to carry back
to London a story which would not only win upon a rich man's gratitude,
but advance him considerably in the favor of those who could well reward
his labors.

This was an amiable reflection and one that ministered greatly to his
self-content. No cloud stood upon the horizon of his self-esteem nor did
shadows darken his glowing hopes. He had promised Richard Gessner to
arrest the girl Lois Boriskoff, and arrested she would be before twelve
o'clock to-morrow. As for this amiable English lad, so full of fine
resolutions, so defiant, so self-willed, it would be a good jest enough
to clap him in a police-station for four-and-twenty hours and to bow him
out again, with profuse apologies, when the girl was on her way to
Petersburg to join her amiable father in the Schlusselburg.

For Alban personally he had a warm regard. The very honesty of his
character, his habit of saying just what he meant (so foreign to the
Count's own practice), his ingenuous delight in all that he saw, his
modern knight-errantry based upon an absurdly old-fashioned notion of
right and wrong and justice and all such stuff as that, these were the
very qualiti