Prince Falkenberg stood with his hands behind him, thinking. He had relapsed into his former grim and impenetrable silence. And while he waited the sweat stood out in beads upon Estermen's forehead. Greatly he feared that the worst was to come!
"Have you anything else to say to me?" his master asked.
"Nothing!" Estermen replied, with faltering lips.
Prince Falkenberg's eyes were fierce orbs of light and his servant quailed before him.
"Have you any reason to believe that the origin of the crime is suspected?"
It was the question which above all others he had dreaded! Estermen was a coward and a fluent liar. The latter gift, however, availed him nothing. He felt as though the nerves of his tongue were being controlled by some other agency. Against his will he told the truth.
"Jean Charles is watching these apartments!"
"Ah!"
Prince Falkenberg's single exclamation was the death sentence of his agent. Estermen knew it and his knees knocked one against the other.
"For six years," Prince Falkenberg said, after a moment's pause, "you have lived an easy and a comfortable life, Estermen,—a life, I dare say, spent among the gutter vices which would naturally appeal to a person of your temperament; a life, apart from the small services which I have required of you, directed altogether by your own inclinations. Be thankful for those six years. As you well know, but for me they would have been spent either in prison or in the problematical future world—a matter entirely at the discretion of the judge who tried you. It pleased me to rescue you for my own purpose. You were possessed of a certain amount of low cunning and a complete absence of all ordinary human qualities, a combination which made you a useful servant of my will. My one condition has been always before you. The present case demands your fulfillment of it."