master. "You may do so whenever you find
him here again, my friend," and for an instant Glueck almost smiled.

"Will Your Highness dine in your apartment tonight?" he asked.

The Prince hesitated; then his face relaxed as at some pleasant thought.

"No, Glueck," he said, "I will dine downstairs. Get my bath ready."

CHAPTER IX

Pelletan's Skeleton

As he left the dining-room that evening, Rushford crooked an imperious
finger at Monsieur Pelletan.

"I want a word with you," he said in his ear.

"In private, monsieur?" asked the little Frenchman, with some
trepidation.

"Yes, I think it would better be in private--that is, if you can
accomplish it in this bedlam."

"Oh, I haf a place, monsieur, where no one will intrude," and Pelletan
led the way through the hotel office to a little door back of the desk.
"T'is iss my--vat you call eet in English?--my sty, my kennel--"

"Your den."

"Iss t'ere a difference?" asked Pelletan, fumbling with the lock.

"A sty is for pigs and a kennel for dogs," Rushford explained. "A den
is for wild beasts. These niceties of the English language are not for
you, Pelletan."

"Still," persisted Pelletan, "a man iss no more a wild beast t'an he iss
a dog or a pig."

"Not nearly so much so, very often," agreed Rushford, heartily. "You
have me there, Pelletan. Sty would undoubtedly be the right word in many
cases."

"Fery well, t'en," said Pelletan, proudly, opening the door, "pehold my
sty!" and he stood aside that his companion might enter.

It was a little square box of a room jammed with such a litter of
bric-a-brac as is to be picked up only on the boulevards--trifles in
Bohemian glass, a lizard stuffed with straw, carved fragments of jade
and ivory, a Sevres vase bearing the portrait of Du Barry, an Indian
chibook, a pink-cheeked Dresden shepherdess, a sabre of the time of
Napoleon, a leering Hindoo idol, a hideous dragon in Japanese bronze
grimacing furiously at a Barye lion--all of them huddled together
without order or arrangement, as they would have been in an auction room
or an antique shop. In one corner stood a low table of Italian mosaic,
bearing a somewhat battered statuette of Saint Genevieve plying her
distaff, and the walls were fairly covered with photographs--
photographs, for the most part, of women more anxious to display their
charms of person to an admiring world than to observe the rigour of
convention.

Rushford dropped into one of the two