A round of inspection of all the principal jewel marts of the
continent had been only a fruitless, solitary tourist promenade.
And the ominous silence of Captain Anson Anstruther, A. D. C.,
boded no good to the military future of the adventurer. "Damn me,
if I don't think that I have been hoodwinked!" growled Major Hawke,
on his re-turn from Moscow and St. Petersburg, whither he had been
ordered, as a last resort, to see the Court jewelers.
From Warsaw, he wrote to the Hotel Faucon, at Lausanne, to send
all his letters to meet him at Berlin, where Jack Blunt had given
him the address of the safest "fence" in all Kaiser Wilhelm's broad
domain. He had his own jewels valued there in Russia, but dared
not sell them.
With a sudden inspiration, born of a growing fear for the stability
of his house of cards, so flimsy in construction, he ran down to
Jitomir, and the half-crazed adventurer only lingered an hour with
the Intendant of Madame Alixe Delavigne's grand old domain. He
found the bird flown. Had he been duped? A permission to view the
old chateau was courteously accorded, and then Alan Hawke soon
realized that he was betrayed. For the fact that Madame was still
absent, "traveling around the world," and had not visited her
Volhynian estate for a year, proved to him now that he had been
doubly tricked. "Ah! By God! I have it!" he cried, as he set his
teeth in a white rage.
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