en times as much--and
with safety. Look at this!"--and Monsieur Giraumont took a forged
Spanish dollar from his pocket, so skilfully manufactured that the
connoisseurs were lost in admiration--"you may pass thousands of these
all over Europe, except France, and who is ever to detect you? But it
will require better machinery than you have here."

Thus conversing, Monsieur Giraumont did not perceive that Mr. Gawtrey
had been examining him very curiously and minutely. But Birnie had noted
their chief's attention, and once attempted to join his new ally, when
Gawtrey laid his hand on his shoulder, and stopped him.

"Do not speak to your friend till I bid you, or--" he stopped short, and
touched his pistols.

Birnie grew a shade more pale, but replied with his usual sneer:

"Suspicious!--well, so much the better!" and seating himself carelessly
at the table, lighted his pipe.

"And now, Monsieur Giraumont," said Gawtrey, as he took the head of
the table, "come to my right hand. A half-holiday in your honour. Clear
these infernal instruments; and more wine, mes amis!"

The party arranged themselves at the table. Among the desperate there
is almost invariably a tendency to mirth. A solitary ruffian, indeed, is
moody, but a gang of ruffians are jovial. The coiners talked and laughed
loud. Mr. Birnie, from his dogged silence, seemed apart from the rest,
though in the centre. For in a noisy circle a silent tongue builds a
wall round its owner. But that respectable personage kept his furtive
watch upon Giraumont and Gawtrey, who appeared talking together, very
amicably. The younger novice of that night, equally silent, seated
towards the bottom of the table, was not less watchful than Birnie. An
uneasy, undefinable foreboding had come over him since the entrance
of Monsieur Giraumont; this had been increased by the manner of Mr.
Gawtrey. His faculty of observation, which was very acute, had detected
something false in the chief's blandness to their guest--something
dangerous in the glittering eye that Gawtrey ever, as he spoke to
Giraumont, bent on that person's lips as he listened to his reply. For,
whenever William Gawtrey suspected a man, he watched not his eyes, but
his lips.

Waked from his scornful reverie, a strange spell chained Morton's
attention to the chief and the guest, and he bent forward, with parted
mouth and straining ear, to catch their conversation.

"It seems to me a little strange," said Mr. Gawtrey,