“Your hirelings will tamper with his birds and his effects in the night—­I know that, Monsieur le Comte,” she had said when she demanded this.  “He is a nervous fellow, this poor Clopin; I wish him to be able to ring for help if you and your men go too far.”

Clopin was sitting by the window chattering to his birds when Cleek entered, and a glance at him was sufficient to decide two points:  first, he was not disguised, nor was his partial blindness in any way a sham, for an idiot could have seen that the droop of the left eyelid over the staring, palpably artificial eye which glazed over the empty socket beneath was due to perfectly natural causes; and, second, that the man was indeed what the Count had said he resembled, namely, a gutter-bred outcast.

“French!” was Cleek’s silent comment upon him.  “One of those charlatans who infest the streets of Paris with their so-called ’fortune-telling birds,’ who, for ten centimes, pick out an envelope with their beaks as a means of telling you what the future is supposed to hold.  What has made a woman like this pick up a fellow of his stamp?  Hum-m-m!  Puppy, I think you are a good move,” stroking the ears of the mongrel dog; “a very much better move than a cage of useless parakeets that are meant to throw suspicion in the wrong direction and have a seed-cup so large and so obviously overfilled that it is safe to say there is nothing hidden in it and never has been!  And madame has a fancy for waxlights,” his gaze travelling upward to the glittering chandelier.  “Hum-m-m!  How well they know, these women whose beauty is going off, that waxlights show less of Time’s ravages than gas or electricity.  Candles in the chandelier; candles in the sconces, candles on the mantelpieces.  This room should be very charming when it is lighted at night.”

It was—­as he learned later.  Just now things not quite so charming filled the bill, for madame was jeering at him in a manner not to be understood.

“A police spy—­that is what you are, monsieur!” she said, coming up to him and impudently snapping her fingers under his nose.  “Such a fool, this white-headed old dotard of a Count, to think that he can take me in with a silly yarn about going to visit a nephew and bringing him back here to stay.  Monsieur, you are a police spy.  Well, good luck to you.  Get what the Mauravanian king wants, if—­you—­can!”

“Madame,” replied Cleek, with a deeply deferential bow and with an accent that seemed born of Paris, “madame, that is what I mean to do, I assure you.”

“Ah, do you?” she answered, with a scream of laughter.  “You hear that, Clopin?  You hear that, my good servitors?  This silly French noodle is going to get the things in spite of us.  Oho, but you have a fine opinion of yourself, monsieur.  You need work fast, too, pretty boaster, I can tell you.  For the royal jewellers will require the Rainbow Pearl very soon to fix it in its place in the crown for the coronation ceremony, and if that