ten it. The electric light
still burned softly there.

'Will you smoke?' Hamilton asked. 'I smoke here every night, and
Sarrasin too, mostly. It won't arouse any suspicion if the smoke gets
about the corridor. I am often up much later than this. You need not
answer, and then your voice can't be heard. Just take a cigar.'

The Dictator quietly nodded, and took two cigars, which he selected very
carefully, and began to smoke.

'Do you know,' Ericson said, 'that to-morrow is my birthday? No--I mean
it is already my birthday.'

'As if I didn't know,' Hamilton replied.

'Odd, if anything should happen.'

Then there was absolute silence in the room. Each man kept his thoughts
to himself, and yet each knew well enough what the other was thinking
of. Ericson was thinking, among other things, how, if there should
really be some assassin-plot, what a trouble and a scandal and even a
serious danger he should have brought upon the Langleys, who were so
kind and sweet to him. He was thinking of Sarrasin, and of the danger
the gallant veteran was running for a cause which, after all, was no
cause of his. He could hardly as yet believe in the existence of the
murder-plot; and still, with his own knowledge of the practices of
former Governments in Gloria, he could not look upon the positive
evidence of Sarrasin's telegram from across the Atlantic and the sudden
suspicions of Dolores as insignificant. He knew well that one of the
practices of former Governments in Gloria had been, when they wanted a
dangerous enemy removed, to employ some educated and clever criminal
already under conviction and sentence of death, and release him for the
time with the promise that, if he should succeed in doing their work,
means should be found to relieve him from his penalty altogether. When
he became Dictator he had himself ordered the re-arrest of two such men
who had had the audacity to return to the capital to claim their reward,
under the impression that they should find their old friends still in
power. He commuted the death punishment in their case, bad as they were,
on the principle that they were the victims of a loathsome system, and
that they were tempted into the new crime. But he left them to
imprisonment for life. Ericson had a strong general objection to the
infliction of capital punishment--to the punishment that is irreparable,
that cannot be recalled. He was not actually an uncompromising opponent
on moral grounds of the princi