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 money in twenty-four hours, and your jeweller will have this. It's strange if he won't wait that long when he hears the tale you can tell, ay, better than any man in Paris."

He began to be convinced at this, and for six days and nights we worked like niggers, getting old musty parchments from Castle Rath, my master's place in Ireland, and writing into them a sham account of the supposed Mazarin diamond. By the time we'd done, we had a pile which would have satisfied all the judges in France; and then only did we communicate with Benjamin King, who was staying at the Hotel Windsor. He replied, by a messenger, saying that he was sorry to miss the opportunity of seeing so famous a diamond, but business compelled him to leave Paris for Vienna that very evening, and he might not be in the city again for three months.

"Was there ever such luck on God's earth?" cried Sir Nicolas, when he heard this tale. "That we should lose him by twenty-four hours! It's enough to make a man shoot himself."

"No such thing, sir," said I. "What is to be done in Paris is to be done in Vienna. For the matter of that, you'll buy the diamond easier there than here, and there won't be so much risk in taking another name. What's to stop you telling King that you also must be in Vienna, say, in a fortnight's time, and will call upon him there? The job's worth the money, any way."

Well, he thought it over, and fourteen days after