pavilion with him. I heard him lock the door—and then, precisely as it was on the first night I had seen them, there was a dead silence in the woods, and every living thing seemed to have fled.
"Bigg," said I to myself, crawling at last from my hiding-place, "if ever you ran against a stone wall, this is the day. You can make as much of it as you could of a mummy. The best place for you is bed—and after that Paris."
I made up my mind to this, and, buttoning my coat round me, I ran back sharply to the château. It was all too new, too surprising for me to make head or tail of it, and I do believe that I ran all the way to the great house, with the word "signals" ringing in my ears. When at length I did stop, I was gasping for breath on the lawn before the drawing-room windows; and I saw, as I stood, that Mme. Pauline's guests were still round the roulette board. But she herself was not there,—I knew she could not be,—and as for the others, the only one who interested me was Sir Nicolas himself. It did not take me very long to learn how it had gone with him. One glance at his face told me the story. He had been losing heavily again.
For five minutes, perhaps, I watched the party, and being certain at last that nothing more was to be gained by cooling my heels on the lawn, I went up to my bit of a bedroom and lay down, dressed as I was, to think. I knew well enough that I should have little sleep that night; but it was not until I
