that trip I had an adventure destined to prove of vital import to that task.

The big hotel in which I was staying caught fire one night, and the visitors, most of them women and elderly men, were half mad with panic. I was escaping when I found crouching in one of the corridors, fear-stricken, helpless, and hysterical, a very beautiful woman whom I had seen at the dinner table, the laughing centre of a noisy and admiring crowd of men.  I first shook some particles of sense into her and then got her out.

It was a perfectly easy thing to do without any risk to me; but she said I had saved her life.  Probably I had: for she might have lain there till she was suffocated by the smoke; and she insisted upon showering much hysterical gratitude upon me; and then wished to make me her close friend.  She was a Madame Constans; and, as I can be cautious enough upon occasion, I had some inquiries made about her from our Embassy.  The caution was justified.  She was a secret Government agent; a police spy with a past.

I parted from her therefore amid vivid evidences of affection from her and vehement protestations that, if ever she could return the obligation, her life would willingly be at my disposal.  I accepted her declarations at their verbal worth and expected never to see her again.

But the Fates had arranged otherwise; and it was with genuine astonishment that when Madame d'Artelle was pointed out to me one day driving in the Stadwalchen of Pesth, I recognized her as Madame Constans.

This fact set me thinking.  What could she be doing in Buda Pesth?  Why was she coiling the net of intrigue round the young Count--the future Duke?  Was she still a secret Government agent promoted to an international position?  Who was behind her in it all?  These and other questions of the kind were started.

Then came the mysterious theft of the ducal jewels; and through my instinct, or intuition, call it by what term you may, that which was a mystery to so many became my key to the whole problem.  Count Karl was in the toils of the lovely French-woman; he was one of the very few persons who had access to the jewels; he was admittedly a man of dissipated habits; and it was an easy deduction that she had instigated the robbery; more to test the extent of her power over him, perhaps, than because she coveted the jewels.  There was much more than mere vulgar theft in it; that was but one of the coils she threw round him. She was in the Hungarian capital because others had sent her to find out 

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