Then it is over.

Doctor Chicago, breathing hard and looking his dogged defiance, stands there in the hands of his captors.

“Do you change your mind, John Craig?” asks the woman, fastening her burning gaze upon his face.

“I have too much Scotch blood in me for that.  On the contrary, I am more than ever determined to pursue my mission without any outside assistance,” he answers.

“Take him away!” she cries, and the look that crosses her face can only be likened to the black clouds preceding the hurricane.

John struggles no longer, for he realizes that he is safer out of her sight than in it.

They take him through a door-way and the last he hears from the beautiful tigress is her taunting cry of: 

“We will break this proud spirit of yours, John Craig—­what you scorn now you will beg for after awhile, when it is too late!”

He wonders whether this is a prophecy.

The men hurry him along a narrow hall, for many of these Maltese houses are built in a queer way, nor do they treat him with consideration, but rather the contrary.

When he ventures to protest, the man who opened the door orders silence and enforces it with a cowardly blow from his fist.

John looks him straight in the eye and says: 

“You coward!  I will remember that,” at which the man turns his head away and swears under his breath.

Presently they halt in front of a door, which the leader unlocks.  At a word from him the young American is pushed inside.

John, receiving such an impetus, staggers and throws out his hands for support, but failing to find anything of this kind, pitches over, just as the door slams shut.

He recovers himself and sits up, a trifle bruised, but not otherwise injured through his rough treatment.

This is a nice predicament, to be shut up in a house of Valetta, while, perhaps, Philander Sharpe returns to the hotel with a story of his succumbing to the wiles of a beautiful enchantress.

The steamer will sail without him, and the duse must be to pay generally.

John begins, like a man, to wonder if he can do anything for himself; that spirit so distinctive, so Chicago like, will not allow him to sit down and repine.

Surrounded by gloom, how will he find out the nature of his prison?

He endeavors to penetrate the darkness—­a trace of light finds an entrance under the door and relieves the somber blank.  It does more, for all at once John’s eyes discover something that rivets his attention.

There are two of them—­eyes that gleam in the darkness like those of a great cat.

A thrill sweeps over the doctor; can it be possible they have shut him in here with some great fierce animal that will tear him limb from limb?  Is this Pauline Potter’s dramatic revenge?

Who can blame him for a sudden quaking in the region of his heart—­such a fate is too terrible to calmly contemplate; but this qualm is only momentary, and then Doctor Chicago is himself again, brave and self-reliant.