It stood four-square and massive on a corner between the avenues de Friedland et des Champs-Elysees, near their junction at the Place de l’Etoile:  a solid stone pile of a town-house in the most modern mode, without architectural beauty, boasting little attempt at exterior embellishment, but smelling aloud of Money; just such a maison de ville as a decent bourgeois banker might be expected to build him when he contemplates retiring after doing the Rothschilds a wicked one in the eye.

It was like Liane’s impudence, too.  Lanyard smiled at the thought as he studied the mansion from the backwards of a dark doorway in the diagonally opposed block of dwellings.  Her kind was always sure to seek, once its fortunes were on firm footing, to establish itself, as here, in the very heart of an exclusive residential district; as if thinking to absorb social sanctity through the simple act of rubbing shoulders with it; or else, as was more likely to be the case with a woman of Liane Delorme’s temper, desiring more to affront a world from which she was outcast than to lay siege to its favour.

It seemed, however, truly deplorable that Liane should have proved so conventional-minded in this particular respect.  It rendered one’s pet project much too difficult of execution.  Earnestly as one desired to have a look at the inside of that house without the knowledge of its inmates, its aspect was forbidding and discouraging in the utmost extreme.

Heavy gates of wrought bronze guarded the front doors.  The single side or service-door was similarly protected if more simply.  And stout grilles of bronze barred every window on the level of the street.

Now none of these could have withstood the attack of a man of ingenuity with a little time at his disposal.  But Lanyard could count on only the few remaining minutes of true night.  Retarded though it might be by shrouded skies, dawn must come all too soon for his comfort.  Yet he was conscious of no choice in the matter:  he must and in spite of everything would know to-night what was going on behind that blank screen of stone.  To-morrow night would be too late.  Tonight, if there were any warrant for his suspicions, the jewels of Eve de Montalais lay in the dwelling of Liane Delorme; or if they were not there, the secret of their hiding was.  But to-morrow both, and more than likely Liane as well, would be on the wing; or Lanyard had been sorely mistaken in seeing in her as badly frightened a woman as he had ever known, when she had learned of the assassination of de Lorgnes.

It was possible, he thought it extremely probable, that Liane Delorme was as powerful as Athenais Reneaux had asserted; influential, that is, with the State, with the dealers in its laws and the dispensers of its protection.  But now she had not to reckon with such as these, but with enemies of her own sort, with an antagonism as reckless of law and order as she herself.  And she was afraid of that, infinitely