She took the water color out of the bosom of her jacket and gave it to him.

He carried it over to the window and studied it a moment.  Then he turned with a sneering oath.

“The devil take your treasure,” he said, “these things are water-elephants.  I don’t care a farthing if they stand on the bottom of every lake in Africa!”

And he flung the water color toward her.  Mechanically the stunned woman picked it up and smoothed it out in her fingers.

With the key to the picture she saw it clearly, the shadowy bodies of the beasts and the tips of their trunks distended on the surface like a purple flower.  And vaguely, as though it were a memory from a distant life, she recalled hearing the French Ambassador and Baron Rudd discussing the report of an explorer who pretended to have seen these supposed fabulous elephants come out of an African forest and go down under the waters of Lake Leopold.

She stood there a moment, breaking the thing into pieces with her bare hands.  Then she went out.  At the door on the landing she very nearly stepped against a little cockney.

“My Lidy,” he whined, “I was bringing your gloves; you dropped them on your way up.”

She took them mechanically and began to draw them on . . . the cryptic sign of the cleaner on the wrist hem was now to her indicatory of her submerged estate.  The little cockney hung about a moment as for a gratuity delayed, then he disappeared down the stair before her.

She went slowly down, fitting the gloves to her fingers.

Midway of the flight she paused.  The voice of the little cockney, but without the accent, speaking to a Bobby standing beside the entrance reached her.

“It was Sir Henry Marquis who set the Yard to register all laundry marks in London.  Great C. I. D. Chief, Sir Henry!”

And Lady Muriel remembered that she had removed these gloves in order to turn the slipping key in Bramwell Winton’s safe lock.

X.-The Last Adventure

The talk had run on treasure.

I could not sleep and my friends had dropped in.  I had the big South room on the second floor of the Hotel de Paris.  It looks down on the Casino and the Mediterranean.  Perhaps you know it.

Queer friends, you’d say.  Every man-jack of them a gambler.  But when one begins to sit about all night with his eyes open, the devil’s a friend.

Barclay was standing before the fire.  The others had drifted out.  He’s a big man pitted with the smallpox.  He made a gesture, flinging out his hand toward the door.

“That bunch thinks there’s a curse on treasure, Sir Henry.  That’s one of the oldest notions in the world . . . it’s unlucky.”

“But I know where there’s a treasure that’s not unlucky.  At least it was not unlucky for poor Charlie Tavor.  He did not get it, but there was no curse on it that reached to him.  It helped poor Charlie finish in style.  He died like a lord in a big country house, with a formal garden and a line of lackeys.”