"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.