"She cleared out a month before this strange murder," he was forced to admit, "and Fritz Braun was off for Europe before this deed. No; the poor fellow was either dogged from the office, or else trapped on his way to the bank."
Lilienthal saw his own profitable schemes all endangered. "If I owned up to a single scrap of information, if I were hauled into any court proceedings, my secret patrons would take French leave forever!"
And so, the prudent wretch merely adhered to his plain story that he had sold the late Mr. Clayton an artist proof of the famous Danube view. But, looking upon the unclaimed duplicate now in his window, Lilienthal softly chuckled and rubbed his hands. "I am a good two hundred and fifty ahead on that lucky picture." For he could not find Miss Irma Gluyas to deliver to her the property which was her own property.
Far away, by the shores of the yeasty Baltic, when Hugh Worthington rendered up his repentant soul, two guilty ones stealthily regarded each other's faces in the little hotel in Lastadie, where "Mr. August Meyer" had taken refuge.
The huge "Mesopotamia" lay icily at her docks, and the graceful woman had vanished from the cabins where her would-be betrayer had watched her every movement. Fritz Braun's active mind had sounded every danger now encircling his future pathway.
There was a circle of fire around him, though, as he kept hidden in the little suburban hotel, where his smuggling confederates had found him a safe refuge as their chief. The grinning head steward had helped him smuggle his unsuspected booty on shore, and, while Fritz Braun gazed moodily out of the windows of the old hostelry, he planned his future hiding.
Neither the dangerous dupe at his side nor his hoodwinked associates of the International Smuggling Association knew of the vast fortune which Braun had artfully hidden upon his arrival.
Well he knew that his life would pay the penalty in a moment if the blood-stained treasure were suspected to be in his hands.
And so, with careful craft, he labored to throw off all his dangerous associates and quietly disappear to a retreat, already decided upon, in the sleepy environs of Breslau.
"First, to watch my lady!" he decided, for he was not deceived by Irma Gluyas' apparent quiet. His first care had been to obtain the New York journals' regularly arriving. "If there is any hubbub over there, I will be on guard, before they can reach me," he mused, as he glowered over his wine at the woman who now panted for liberty.