But, when he had read Captain Anstruther's formal note, he tore open the letter of the great French Banking Company.

The two letters curtly illustrated the old saw, that "it never rains, but it pours!" With a fluttering heart poor Justine Delande watched her undeclared lover's blackening face.
"Hell and furies!" he cried, "the whole world is leagued against me.
I've got to go back to India now, Justine, and go alone.

Luck is dead against me now." And the whitening face of the woman who hung on his every glance made the infuriated man even more reckless.

"Damn them, I'll grind them all to powder!" he growled.

For the tide was on the turn, and it was dead water again at Geneva, the tide fast receding, and the man who was "a devil for luck" was soon left on the rocks of a silent despair.
Alan Hawke's eyes gleamed out with a murderous sheen as he scanned both letters carefully.