ich were the Maharajah's twenty thousand pounds. Not bad
pay for six months' work, of which his pawns had taken the most arduous
share.

He did not anticipate any trouble from these pawns, except perhaps, from
one. Leslie Chermside was safe on board the _Cobra_, and Bhagwan Singh
might be trusted to see to it that he was never heard of again. That
vain puppet, Louise Aubin, could do him no harm if she would, since she
would believe, as all the world would believe, that Violet had
voluntarily fled with her lover. And if the flighty French maid was
disappointed in her preposterous aims with regard to himself--well, a
little palm-grease would effectually staunch the bleeding of her fickle
heart. Simon Brant, Bully Cheeseman, Tuke, and Sinnett were his
accomplices rather than his tools, and they might be trusted to keep
silence for their own sakes; if not, he knew enough to hang each or all
of them. The crew of the _Cobra_ were to be paid off in India, whence
they would doubtless be scattered to the four winds of heaven; and,
besides the captain and the mate, not one of them was aware of his
connection with the affair.

The remaining exception, which had cost him more uneasiness than all the
rest combined, was Pierre Legros. The onion-seller's insane and
vindictive jealousy of himself in respect of Louise might grow into a
factor to be reckoned with, entailing unpleasant, if not actually
perilous, consequences. Well, it would be surprising if he, Travers
Nugent, the finished schemer, were not equal to dealing with a
half-demented foreign sailor, whose position was, to put it mildly,
somewhat insecure.

"A hint to the fair Louise to revert to her original suspicion would
satisfactorily settle Monsieur Pierre Legros, without my having to make
an open move myself," he mused aloud, as he summed up the situation.

Sitting there lazily in the lamp-glow, he felt like a general reviewing
a victorious battlefield--"cleaning up the mess," as he put it to
himself, with the advantage that there was no visible mess to clean up.
He had scored another of those easy wins in the great game of life--the
game he had played so long and so successfully, with men and women as
counters and gold as the final stake.

But as he murmured that last self-gratulation there came a sudden sound,
very faint, but near at hand, to break his train of thought. He had left
the long window open so that he could watch the fire-flies on the
dew-frosted grass