Let us return to the moment when Pauline Corsi met these two gold-diggers.
They entered the hotel, and were immediately conducted to a handsomely furnished and brilliantly lighted apartment upon the first floor.
The elder of the two men, the one who had called himself Smith, flung himself into an easy-chair, after dismissing the waiter with an order for a couple of bottles of claret and seltzer water, and looked complacently round the room.
The younger man walked to the open window, from which he watched the receding form of Pauline Corsi, who, after observing the two men enter the hotel, hurried onward toward the end of the deserted street.
"This is a little better than the diggings, eh, Brown?" said Smith.
His companion seemed scarcely to hear him.
"That girl's figure reminds me—" he muttered, "but pshaw! what foolish fancies have addled my brain! She is far away on the shores of another continent."
"What are you muttering about over there?" said Smith, who was evidently in high spirits; "Come here, and drink a tumbler of claret, and let's talk of our plans. To-night has brought us to the end of our journey. The time for silence is past, the hour has come in which we are to speak freely."
"It has."
"Remember; I ask your confidence from no spirit of idle curiosity, and, unless you can give it as freely as I shall give you mine, withhold it altogether."