He taught me to play ecarte, by the
way!"
"Then he was a good teacher, and you--a devilish apt scholar!"
laughed Anstruther, as he politely held the door open for the man
who had coldly fleeced him.
Alan Hawke's pulses were now bounding with the thrill of his unlooked-for
harvest! He experienced a certain pride in his marvelous skill,
and, restraining himself, he soberly paced along the corridor. The
excited aid-de-camp stood for a moment with his foot on the stair,
and then slowly descended. "He suspects nothing!" the amatory youth
murmured, as he passed out upon the broad Quai du Leman.
He walked swiftly along, gayly whistling "Donna e Mobile,"
with certain private variations of his own, until he reached the
splendid monument erected to the miserly old Duke of Brunswick,
who showered his scraped-up millions upon an alien city, to spite
his own fat-witted Brunswickers, and so escaped the blood-fleshed
talons of the hungry-Prussian eagle.
Duke Charles I hovered amiably in the air, over a comfortable
carriage wherein the "other little matters" were most temptingly
materialized in the person of a lovely woman waiting there with
burning eyes, her splendid face veiled in a black Spanish lace
scarf. It was the old fate--"Unlucky at cards, lucky in love!" The
staff officer's abrupt command to "drive everywhere, anywhere,"
until "further orders," was implicitly obeyed by the stolid cabby,
who set off at once for a long round of the mild "lions" of fair
Geneva, nestling there by the shimmering lake.
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