s.

"Your hirelings will tamper with his birds and his effects in the night,
I know that, Monsieur le Comte," she had said when she demanded this.
"He is a nervous fellow, this poor Clopin; I wish him to be able to ring
for help if you and your men go too far."

Clopin was sitting by the window chattering to his birds when Cleek
entered, and a glance at him was sufficient to decide two points: first
he was not disguised, nor was his partial blindness in any way a sham,
for an idiot could have seen that the droop of the left eyelid over the
staring, palpably artificial eye which glazed over the empty socket
beneath was due to perfectly natural causes; and, second, that the man
was indeed what the count had said he resembled, namely, a gutter-bred
outcast.

"French," was Cleek's silent comment upon him. "One of those charlatans
who infest the streets of Paris with their so-called 'fortune-telling
birds,' who, for ten centimes, pick out an envelope with their beaks as
a means of telling you what the future is supposed to hold. What has
made a woman like this pick up with a fellow of his stamp? Hum-m-m!
Puppy, I think you are a good move," stroking the ears of the mongrel
dog; "a very much better move than a cage of useless parakeets that are
meant to throw suspicion in the wrong direction and have a seed-cup so
large and so obviously overfilled that it is safe to say there is
nothing hidden in it and never has been. And madame has a fancy for wax
lights," his gaze travelling upward to the glittering chandelier.
"Hum-m-m! How well they know, these women whose beauty is going off,
that wax-lights show less of Time's ravages than gas or electricity.
Candles in the chandelier; candles in the sconces; candles on the
mantelpiece. This room should be very charming when it is lighted at
night."

It was--as he learned later. Just now things not quite so charming
filled the bill, for madame was jeering at him in a manner not to be
misunderstood.

"A police spy, that is what you are, monsieur!" she said, coming up to
him and impudently snapping her fingers under his nose. "Such a fool
this white-headed old dotard of a count, to think that he can take me in
with a silly yarn about going to visit a nephew and bringing him back
here to stay. Monsieur, you are a police spy. Well, good luck to you.
Get what the Mauravanian king wants, if--you--can!"

"Madame," replied Cleek, with a deeply deferential bow and with an
accent that se