Patrice’s first impulse was to run to the window, but he restrained himself. The danger was becoming defined. Outside, in the twilight, he distinguished through the slanting panes a human form. Next, he saw between the two casements something which gleamed in the light of the fire and which looked like the barrel of a revolver.

“Coralie is done for,” he thought, “if I allow it to be suspected for an instant that I am on my guard.”

She was in fact opposite the window, with no obstacle intervening. He therefore said aloud, in a careless tone:

“Coralie, you must be a little tired. We will say good-by.”

At the same time, he went round her chair to protect her.

But he had not the time to complete his movement. She also no doubt had seen the glint of the revolver, for she drew back abruptly, stammering:

“Oh, Patrice! . . . Patrice! . . .”

Two shots rang out, followed by a moan.

“You’re wounded!” cried Patrice, springing to her side.

“No, no,” she said, “but the fright . . .”

“Oh, if he’s touched you, the scoundrel!”

“No, he hasn’t.”

“Are you quite sure?”

He lost thirty or forty seconds, switching on the electric light, looking at Coralie for signs of a wound and waiting in an agony of suspense for her to regain full consciousness. Only then did he rush to the window, open it wide and climb over the balcony. The room was on the first floor. There was plenty of lattice-work on the wall. But, because of his leg, Patrice had some difficulty in making his way down.

Below, on the terrace, he caught his foot in the rungs of an overturned ladder. Next, he knocked against some policemen who were coming from the ground-floor. One of them shouted:

“I saw the figure of a man making off that way.”

“Which way?” asked Patrice.

The man was running in the direction of the lane. Patrice followed him. But, at that moment, from close beside the little door, there came shrill cries and the whimper of a choking voice:

“Help! . . . Help! . . .”

When Patrice came up, the policeman was already flashing his electric lantern over the ground; and they both saw a human form writhing in the shrubbery.

“The door’s open!” shouted Patrice. “The assassin has escaped! Go after him!”

The policeman vanished down the lane; and, Ya-Bon appearing on the scene, Patrice gave him his orders:

“Quick as you can, Ya-Bon! . . . If the policeman is going up the lane, you go down. Run! I’ll look after the victim.”

All this time, Patrice was stooping low, flinging the light of the policeman’s lantern on the man who lay struggling on the ground. He recognized old Siméon, nearly strangled, with a red-silk cord round his neck.

“How do you feel?” he asked. “Can you understand what I’m saying?”

He unfastened the cord and repeated his question. Siméon stuttered out a series of incoherent syllables and then suddenly began to sing and laugh, a very low, jerky laugh, alternating with hiccoughs. He had gone mad.

When M. Masseron arrived, Patrice told him what had happened:

“Do you really believe it’s all over?” he asked.

“No. You were right and I was wrong,” said M. Masseron. “We must take every precaution to ensure Mme. Essarès’ safety. The house shall be guarded all night.”

A few minutes later the policeman and Ya-Bon returned, after a vain search. The key that had served to open the door was found in the lane. It was exactly similar to the one in Patrice Belval’s possession, equally old and equally rusty. The would-be murderer had thrown it away in the course of his flight.

It was seven o’clock when Patrice, accompanied by Ya-Bon, left the house in the Rue Raynouard and turned towards Neuilly. As usual, Patrice took Ya-Bon’s arm and, leaning upon him for support as he walked, he said:

“I can guess what you’re thinking, Ya-Bon.”

Ya-Bon grunted.

“That’s it,” said Captain Belval, in a tone of approval. “We are entirely in agreement all along the line. What strikes you first and foremost is the utter incapacity displayed by the police. A pack of addle-pates, you say? When you speak like that, Master Ya-Bon, you are talking impertinent nonsense, which, coming from you, does not astonish me and which might easily make me give you the punishment you deserve. But we will overlook it this time. Whatever you may say, the police do what they can, not to mention that, in war-time, they have other things to do than to occupy themselves with the mysterious relations between Captain Belval and Mme. Essarès. It is I therefore who will have to act; and I have hardly any one to reckon on but myself. Well, I wonder if I am a match for such adversaries. To think that here’s one who has the cheek to come back to the house while it is being watched by the police, to put up a ladder, to listen no doubt to my conversation with M. Masseron and afterwards to what I said to Little Mother Coralie and, lastly, to send a couple of bullets whizzing past our ears! What do you say? Am I the man for the job? And could all the French police, overworked as they are, give me the indispensable assistance? No, the man I need for clearing up a thing like this is an exceptional sort of chap, one who unites every quality in himself, in short the type of man one never sees.”

Patrice leant more heavily on his companion’s arm:

“You, who know so many good people, haven’t you the fellow I want concealed about your person? A genius of sorts? A demigod?”

Ya-Bon grunted again, merrily this time, and withdrew his arm. He always carried a little electric lamp. Switching on the light, he put the handle between his teeth. Then he took a bit of chalk out of his jacket-pocket.

A grimy, weather-beaten plaster wall ran along the street. Ya-Bon took his stand in front of the wall and, turning the light upon it, began to write with an unskilful hand, as though each letter cost him a measureless effort and as though the sum total of those letters were the only one that he had ever succeeded in composing and remembering. In this way he wrote two words which Patrice read out:

Arsène Lupin.

“Arsène Lupin,” said Patrice, under his breath. And, looking at Ya-Bon in amazement, “Are you in your right mind? What do you mean by Arsène Lupin? Are you suggesting Arsène Lupin to me?”

Ya-Bon nodded his head.

“Arsène Lupin? Do you know him?”

“Yes,” Ya-Bon signified.

Patrice then remembered that the Senegalese used to spend his days at the hospital getting his good-natured comrades to read all the adventures of Arsène Lupin aloud to him; and he grinned:

“Yes, you know him as one knows somebody whose history one has read.”

“No,” protested Ya-Bon.

“Do you know him personally?”

“Yes.”

“Get out, you silly fool! Arsène Lupin is dead. He threw himself into the sea from a rock;[2] and you pretend that you know him?”

“Yes.”

“Do you mean to say that you have met him since he died?”

“Yes.”

“By Jove! And Master Ya-Bon’s influence with Arsène Lupin is enough to make him come to life again and put himself out at a sign from Master Ya-Bon?”

“Yes.”

“I say! I had a high opinion of you as it was, but now there is nothing for me but to make you my bow. A friend of the late Arsène Lupin! We’re going it! . . . And how long will it take you to place his ghost at our disposal? Six months? Three months? One month? A fortnight?”

Ya-Bon made a gesture.

“About a fortnight,” Captain Belval translated. “Very well, evoke your friend’s spirit; I shall be delighted to make his acquaintance. Only, upon my word, you must have a very poor idea of me to imagine that I need a collaborator! What next! Do you take me for a helpless dunderhead?”

CHAPTER IX
PATRICE AND CORALIE

Nevertheless, Patrice was not easy in his mind. The enemy had given him too many proofs of reckless daring to let him imagine that he could take any steps to ensure her perfect protection. Danger always creeps in where it is least expected; and it was all the more difficult to ward off in that no one knew whence it threatened. Now that Essarès Bey was dead, who was continuing his work? Who had inherited the task of revenge upon Coralie announced in his last letter?

M. Masseron had at once begun his work of investigation, but the dramatic side of the case seemed to leave him indifferent. Since he had not found the body of the man whose dying cries reached Patrice Belval’s ears, since he had discovered no clue to the mysterious assailant who had fired at Patrice and Coralie later in the day, since he was not able to trace where the assailant had obtained his ladder, he dropped these questions and confined his efforts entirely to the search of the eighteen hundred bags of gold. These were all that concerned him.

“We have every reason to believe that they are here,” he said, “between the four sides of the quadrilateral formed by the garden and the house. Obviously, a bag of gold weighing a hundredweight does not take up as much room, by a long way, as a sack of coal of the same weight. But, for all that, eighteen hundred bags represent a cubic content; and a content like that is not easily concealed.”

In two days he had assured himself that the treasure was hidden neither in the house nor under the house. On the evenings when Essarès Bey’s car brought the gold out of the coffers of the Franco-Oriental Bank to the Rue Raynouard, Essarès, the chauffeur and the man known as Grégoire used to pass a thick wire through the grating of which the accomplices spoke. This wire was found. Along the wire ran hooks, which were also found; and on these the bags were slung and afterwards stacked in a large cellar situated exactly under the library. It is needless to say that M. Masseron and his detectives devoted all their ingenuity and all the painstaking patience of which they were capable to the task of searching every corner of this cellar. Their efforts only established beyond doubt that it contained no secret, save that of a staircase which ran down from the library and which was closed at the top by a trap-door concealed by the carpet.

In addition to the grating on the Rue Raynouard, there was another which overlooked the garden, on the level of the first terrace. These two openings were barricaded on the inside by very heavy shutters, so that it was an easy matter to stack thousands and thousands of rouleaus of gold in the cellar before sending them away.

“But how were they sent away?” M. Masseron wondered. “That’s the mystery. And why this intermediate stage in the basement, in the Rue Raynouard? Another mystery. And now we have Fakhi, Bournef and Co. declaring that, this time, it was not sent away, that the gold is here and that it can be found for the searching. We have searched the house. There is still the garden. Let us look there.”

It was a beautiful old garden and had once formed part of the wide-stretching estate where people were in the habit, at the end of the eighteenth century, of going to drink the Passy waters. With a two-hundred-yard frontage, it ran from the Rue Raynouard to the quay of the river-side and led, by four successive terraces, to an expanse of lawn as old as the rest of the garden, fringed with thickets of evergreens and shaded by groups of tall trees.

But the beauty of the garden lay chiefly in its four terraces and in the view which they afforded of the river, the low ground on the left bank and the distant hills. They were united by twenty sets of steps; and twenty paths climbed from the one to the other, paths cut between the buttressing walls and sometimes hidden in the floods of ivy that dashed from top to bottom.

Here and there a statue stood out, a broken column, or the fragments of a capital. The stone balcony that edged the upper terrace was still adorned with all its old terra-cotta vases. On this terrace also were the ruins of two little round temples where, in the old days, the springs bubbled to the surface. In front of the library windows was a circular basin, with in the center the figure of a child shooting a slender thread of water through the funnel of a shell. It was the overflow from this basin, forming a little stream, that trickled over the rocks against which Patrice had stumbled on the first evening.

“Ten acres to explore before we’ve done,” said M. Masseron to himself.

He employed upon this work, in addition to Belval’s cripples, a dozen of his own detectives. It was not a difficult business and was bound to lead to some definite result. As M. Masseron never ceased saying, eighteen hundred bags cannot remain invisible. An excavation leaves traces. You want a hole to go in and out by. But neither the grass of the lawns nor the sand of the paths showed any signs of earth recently disturbed. The ivy? The buttressing-walls? The terraces? Everything was inspected, but in vain. Here and there, in cutting up the ground, old conduit pipes were found, running towards the Seine, and remains of aqueducts that had once served to carry off the Passy waters. But there was no such thing as a cave, an underground chamber, a brick arch or anything that looked like a hiding-place.

Patrice and Coralie watched the progress of the search. And yet, though they fully realized its importance and though, on the other hand, they were still feeling the strain of the recent dramatic hours, in reality they were engrossed only in the inexplicable problem of their fate; and their conversation nearly always turned upon the mystery of the past.

Coralie’s mother was the daughter of a French consul at Salonica, where she married a very rich man of a certain age, called Count Odolavitch, the head of an ancient Servian family. He died a year after Coralie was born. The widow and child were at that time in France, at this same house in the Rue Raynouard, which Count Odolavitch had purchased through a young Egyptian called Essarès, his secretary and factotum.

Coralie here spent three years of her childhood. Then she suddenly lost her mother and was left alone in the world. Essarès took her to Salonica, to a surviving sister of her grandfather the consul, a woman many years younger than her brother. This lady took charge of Coralie. Unfortunately, she fell under Essarès’ influence, signed papers and made her little grand-niece sign papers, until the child’s whole fortune, administered by the Egyptian, gradually disappeared.

At last, when she was about seventeen, Coralie became the victim of an adventure which left the most hideous memory in her mind and which had a fatal effect on her life. She was kidnaped one morning by a band of Turks on the plains of Salonica and spent a fortnight in the palace of the governor of the province, exposed to his desires. Essarès released her. But the release was brought about in so fantastic a fashion that Coralie must have often wondered afterwards whether the Turk and the Egyptian were not in collusion.

At any rate, sick in body and depressed in spirits, fearing a fresh assault upon her liberty and yielding to her aunt’s wishes, a month later she married this Essarès, who had already been paying her his addresses and who now definitely assumed in her eyes the figure of a deliverer. It was a hopeless union, the horror of which became manifest to her on the very day on which it was cemented. Coralie was the wife of a man whom she hated and whose love only grew with the hatred and contempt which she showed for it.

Before the end of the year they came and took up their residence at the house in the Rue Raynouard. Essarès, who had long ago established and was at that time managing the Salonica branch of the Franco-Oriental Bank, bought up almost all the shares of the bank itself, acquired the building in the Rue Lafayette for the head office, became one of the financial magnates of Paris and received the title of bey in Egypt.

This was the story which Coralie told Patrice one day in the beautiful garden at Passy; and, in this unhappy past which they explored together and compared with Patrice Belval’s own, neither he nor Coralie was able to discover a single point that was common to both. The two of them had lived in different parts of the world. Not one name evoked the same recollection in their minds. There was not a detail that enabled them to understand why each should possess a piece of the same amethyst bead nor why their joint images should be contained in the same medallion-pendant or stuck in the pages of the same album.

“Failing everything else,” said Patrice, “we can explain that the pendant found in the hand of Essarès Bey was snatched by him from the unknown friend who was watching over us and whom he murdered. But what about the album, which he wore in a pocket sewn inside his vest?”

Neither attempted to answer the question. Then Patrice asked:

“Tell me about Siméon.”

“Siméon has always lived here.”

“Even in your mother’s time?”

“No, it was one or two years after my mother’s death and after I went to Salonica that Essarès put him to look after this property and keep it in good condition.”

“Was he Essarès’ secretary?”

“I never knew what his exact functions were. But he was not Essarès’ secretary, nor his confidant either. They never talked together intimately. He came to see us two or three times at Salonica. I remember one of his visits. I was quite a child and I heard him speaking to Essarès in a very angry tone, apparently threatening him.”

“With what?”

“I don’t know. I know nothing at all about Siméon. He kept himself very much to himself and was nearly always in the garden, smoking his pipe, dreaming, tending the trees and flowers, sometimes with the assistance of two or three gardeners whom he would send for.”

“How did he behave to you?”

“Here again I can’t give any definite impression. We never talked; and his occupations very seldom brought him into contact with me. Nevertheless I sometimes thought that his eyes used to seek me, through their yellow spectacles, with a certain persistency and perhaps even a certain interest. Moreover, lately, he liked going with me to the hospital; and he would then, either there or on the way, show himself more attentive, more eager to please . . . so much so that I have been wondering this last day or two . . .”

She hesitated for a moment, undecided whether to speak, and then continued:

“Yes, it’s a very vague notion . . . but, all the same . . . Look here, there’s one thing I forgot to tell you. Do you know why I joined the hospital in the Champs-Élysées, the hospital where you were lying wounded and ill? It was because Siméon took me there. He knew that I wanted to become a nurse and he suggested this hospital. . . . And then, if you think, later on, the photograph in the pendant, the one showing you in uniform and me as a nurse, can only have been taken at the hospital. Well, of the people here, in this house, no one except Siméon ever went there. . . . You will also remember that he used to come to Salonica, where he saw me as a child and afterwards as a girl, and that there also he may have taken the snapshots in the album. So that, if we allow that he had some correspondent who on his side followed your footsteps in life, it would not be impossible to believe that the unknown friend whom you assume to have intervened between us, the one who sent you the key of the garden . . .”

“Was old Siméon?” Patrice interrupted. “The theory won’t hold water.”

“Why not?”

“Because this friend is dead. The man who, as you say, sought to intervene between us, who sent me the key of the garden, who called me to the telephone to tell me the truth, that man was murdered. There is not the least doubt about it. I heard the cries of a man who is being killed, dying cries, the cries which a man utters when at the moment of death.”

“You can never be sure.”

“I am, absolutely. There is no shadow of doubt in my mind. The man whom I call our unknown friend died before finishing his work; he died murdered, whereas Siméon is alive. Besides,” continued Patrice, “this man had a different voice from Siméon, a voice which I had never heard before and which I shall never hear again.”

Coralie was convinced and did not insist.

They were seated on one of the benches in the garden, enjoying the bright April sunshine. The buds of the chestnut-trees shone at the tips of the branches. The heavy scent of the wall-flowers rose from the borders; and their brown and yellow blossoms, like a cluster of bees and wasps pressed close together, swayed to the light breeze.

Suddenly Patrice felt a thrill. Coralie had placed her hand on his, with engaging friendliness; and, when he turned to look at her, he saw that she was in tears.

“What’s the matter, Little Mother Coralie?”

Coralie’s head bent down and her cheek touched the officer’s shoulder. He dared not move. She was treating him as a protecting elder brother; and he shrank from showing any warmth of affection that might annoy her.

“What is it, dear?” he repeated. “What’s the matter?”

“Oh, it is so strange!” she murmured. “Look, Patrice, look at those flowers.”

They were on the third terrace, commanding a view of the fourth; and this, the lowest of the terraces, was adorned not with borders of wall-flowers but with beds in which were mingled all manner of spring flowers; tulips, silvery alyssums, hyacinths, with a great round plot of pansies in the middle.

“Look over there,” she said, pointing to this plot with her outstretched arm. “Do you see? . . . Letters. . . .”

Patrice looked and gradually perceived that the clumps of pansies were so arranged as to form on the ground some letters that stood out among the other flowers. It did not appear at the first glance. It took a certain time to see; but, once seen, the letters grouped themselves of their own accord, forming three words set down in a single line:

Patrice and Coralie

“Ah,” he said, in a low voice, “I understand what you mean!”

It gave them a thrill of inexpressible excitement to read their two names, which a friendly hand had, so to speak, sown; their two names united in pansy-flowers. It was inexpressibly exciting too that he and she should always find themselves thus linked together, linked together by events, linked together by their portraits, linked together by an unseen force of will, linked together now by the struggling effort of little flowers that spring up, waken into life and blossom in predetermined order.

Coralie, sitting up, said:

“It’s Siméon who attends to the garden.”

“Yes,” he said, wavering slightly. “But surely that does not affect my opinion. Our unknown friend is dead, but Siméon may have known him. Siméon perhaps was acting with him in certain matters and must know a good deal. Oh, if he could only put us on the right road!”

An hour later, as the sun was sinking on the horizon, they climbed the terraces. On reaching the top they saw M. Masseron beckoning to them.

“I have something curious to show you,” he said, “something I have found which will interest both you, madame, and you, captain, particularly.”

He led them to the very end of the terrace, outside the occupied part of the house next to the library. Two detectives were standing mattock in hand. In the course of their searching, M. Masseron explained, they had begun by removing the ivy from the low wall adorned with terra-cotta vases. Thereupon M. Masseron’s attention was attracted by the fact that this wall was covered, for a length of some yards, by a layer of plaster which appeared to be more recent in date than the stone.

“What did it mean?” said M. Masseron. “I had to presuppose some motive. I therefore had this layer of plaster demolished; and underneath it I found a second layer, not so thick as the first and mingled with the rough stone. Come closer . . . or, rather, no, stand back a little way: you can see better like that.”

The second layer really served only to keep in place some small white pebbles, which constituted a sort of mosaic set in black pebbles and formed a series of large, written letters, spelling three words. And these three words once again were:

Patrice and Coralie

“What do you say to that?” asked M. Masseron. “Observe that the inscription goes several years back, at least ten years, when we consider the condition of the ivy clinging to this part of the wall.”

“At least ten years,” Patrice repeated, when he was once more alone with Coralie. “Ten years ago was when you were not married, when you were still at Salonica and when nobody used to come to this garden . . . nobody except Siméon and such people as he chose to admit. And among these,” he concluded, “was our unknown friend who is now dead. And Siméon knows the truth, Coralie.”

They saw old Siméon, late that afternoon, as they had seen him constantly since the tragedy, wandering in the garden or along the passages of the house, restless and distraught, with his comforter always wound round his head and his spectacles on his nose, stammering words which no one could understand. At night, his neighbor, one of the maimed soldiers, would often hear him humming to himself.

Patrice twice tried to make him speak. He shook his head and did not answer, or else laughed like an idiot.

The problem was becoming complicated; and nothing pointed to a possible solution. Who was it that, since their childhood, had promised them to each other as a pair betrothed long beforehand by an inflexible ordinance? Who was it that arranged the pansy-bed last autumn, when they did not know each other? And who was it that had written their two names, ten years ago, in white pebbles, within the thickness of a wall?

These were haunting questions for two young people in whom love had awakened quite spontaneously and who suddenly saw stretching behind them a long past common to them both. Each step that they took in the garden seemed to them a pilgrimage amid forgotten memories; and, at every turn in a path, they were prepared to discover some new proof of the bond that linked them together unknown to themselves.

As a matter of fact, during those few days, they saw their initials interlaced twice on the trunk of a tree, once on the back of a bench. And twice again their names appeared inscribed on old walls and concealed behind a layer of plaster overhung with ivy.

On these two occasions their names were accompanied by two separate dates:

Patrice and Coralie, 1904
Patrice and Coralie, 1907

“Eleven years ago and eight years ago,” said the officer. “And always our two names: Patrice and Coralie.”

Their hands met and clasped each other. The great mystery of their past brought them as closely together as did the great love which filled them and of which they refrained from speaking.

In spite of themselves, however, they sought out solitude; and it was in this way that, a fortnight after the murder of Essarès Bey, as they passed the little door opening on the lane, they decided to go out by it and to stroll down to the river bank. No one saw them, for both the approach to the door and the path leading to it were hidden by a screen of tall bushes; and M. Masseron and his men were exploring the old green-houses, which stood at the other side of the garden, and the old furnace and chimney which had been used for signaling.

But, when he was outside, Patrice stopped. Almost in front of him, in the opposite wall, was an exactly similar door. He called Coralie’s attention to it, but she said:

“There is nothing astonishing about that. This wall is the boundary of another garden which at one time belonged to the one we have just left.”

“But who lives there?”

“Nobody. The little house which overlooks it and which comes before mine, in the Rue Raynouard, is always shut up.”

“Same door, same key, perhaps,” Patrice murmured, half to himself.

He inserted in the lock the rusty key, which had reached him by messenger. The lock responded.

“Well,” he said, “the series of miracles is continuing. Will this one be in our favor?”

The vegetation had been allowed to run riot in the narrow strip of ground that faced them. However, in the middle of the exuberant grass, a well-trodden path, which looked as if it were often used, started from the door in the wall and rose obliquely to the single terrace, on which stood a dilapidated lodge with closed shutters. It was built on one floor, but was surmounted by a small lantern-shaped belvedere. It had its own entrance in the Rue Raynouard, from which it was separated by a yard and a very high wall. This entrance seemed to be barricaded with boards and posts nailed together.

They walked round the house and were surprised by the sight that awaited them on the right-hand side. The foliage had been trained into rectangular cloisters, carefully kept, with regular arcades cut in yew- and box-hedges. A miniature garden was laid out in this space, the very home of silence and tranquillity. Here also were wall-flowers and pansies and hyacinths. And four paths, coming from four corners of the cloisters, met round a central space, where stood the five columns of a small, open temple, rudely constructed of pebbles and unmortared building-stones.

Under the dome of this little temple was a tombstone and, in front of it, an old wooden praying-chair, from the bars of which hung, on the left, an ivory crucifix and, on the right, a rosary composed of amethyst beads in a gold filigree setting.

“Coralie, Coralie,” whispered Patrice, in a voice trembling with emotion, “who can be buried here?”

They went nearer. There were bead wreaths laid in rows on the tombstone. They counted nineteen, each bearing the date of one of the last nineteen years. Pushing them aside, they read the following inscription in gilt letters worn and soiled by the rain:

HERE LIE
PATRICE AND CORALIE,
BOTH OF WHOM WERE MURDERED
ON THE 14th OF APRIL, 1895.
REVENGE TO ME: I WILL REPAY.

CHAPTER X
THE RED CORD

“We shall find out, Coralie,” he declared. “These things can all be verified. But meanwhile one truth becomes clear. The man who used to interlace the names of Patrice and Coralie was not thinking only of us and was not considering only the future. Perhaps he thought even more of the past, of that Coralie and Patrice whom he knew to have suffered a violent death and whom he had undertaken to avenge. Come away, Coralie. No one must suspect that we have been here.”

They went down the path and through the two doors on the lane. They were not seen coming in. Patrice at once brought Coralie indoors, urged Ya-Bon and his comrades to increase their vigilance and left the house.

He came back in the evening only to go out again early the next day; and it was not until the day after, at three o’clock in the afternoon, that he asked to be shown up to Coralie.

“Have you found out?” she asked him at once.

“I have found out a great many things which do not dispel the darkness of the present. I am almost tempted to say that they increase it. They do, however, throw a very vivid light on the past.”

“Do they explain what we saw two days ago?” she asked, anxiously.

“Listen to me, Coralie.”

He sat down opposite her and said:

“I shall not tell you all the steps that I have taken. I will merely sum up the result of those which led to some result. I went, first of all, to the Mayor of Passy’s office and from there to the Servian Legation.”

“Then you persist in assuming that it was my mother?”

“Yes. I took a copy of her death-certificate, Coralie. Your mother died on the fourteenth of April, 1895.”

“Oh!” she said. “That is the date on the tomb!”

“The very date.”

“But the name? Coralie? My father used to call her Louise.”

“Your mother’s name was Louise Coralie Countess Odolavitch.”

“Oh, my mother!” she murmured. “My poor darling mother! Then it was she who was murdered. It was for her that I was praying over the way?”

“For her, Coralie, and for my father. I discovered his full name at the mayor’s office in the Rue Drouot. My father was Armand Patrice Belval. He died on the fourteenth of April, 1895.”

Patrice was right in saying that a singular light had been thrown upon the past. He had now positively established that the inscription on the tombstone related to his father and Coralie’s mother, both of whom were murdered on the same day. But by whom and for what reason, in consequence of what tragedies? This was what Coralie asked him to tell her.

“I cannot answer your questions yet,” he replied. “But I addressed another to myself, one more easily solved; and that I did solve. This also makes us certain of an essential point. I wanted to know to whom the lodge belonged. The outside, in the Rue Raynouard, affords no clue. You have seen the wall and the door of the yard: they show nothing in particular. But the number of the property was sufficient for my purpose. I went to the local receiver and learnt that the taxes were paid by a notary in the Avenue de l’Opéra. I called on this notary, who told me . . .”

He stopped for a moment and then said:

“The lodge was bought twenty-one years ago by my father. Two years later my father died; and the lodge, which of course formed part of his estate, was put up for sale by the present notary’s predecessor and bought by one Siméon Diodokis, a Greek subject.”

“It’s he!” cried Coralie. “Siméon’s name is Diodokis.”

“Well, Siméon Diodokis,” Patrice continued, “was a friend of my father’s, because my father appointed him the sole executor of his will and because it was Siméon Diodokis who, through the notary in question and a London solicitor, paid my school-fees and, when I attained my majority, made over to me the sum of two hundred thousand francs, the balance of my inheritance.”

They maintained a long silence. Many things were becoming manifest, but indistinctly, as yet, and shaded, like things seen in the evening mist. And one thing stood in sharper outline than the rest, for Patrice murmured:

“Your mother and my father loved each other, Coralie.”

The thought united them more closely and affected them profoundly. Their love was the counterpart of another love, bruised by trials, like theirs, but still more tragic and ending in bloodshed and death.

“Your mother and my father loved each other,” he repeated. “I should say they must have belonged to that class of rather enthusiastic lovers whose passion indulges in charming little childish ways, for they had a trick of calling each other, when alone, by names which nobody else used to them; and they selected their second Christian names, which were also yours and mine. One day your mother dropped her amethyst rosary. The largest of the beads broke in two pieces. My father had one of the pieces mounted as a trinket which he hung on his watch-chain. Both were widowed. You were two years old and I was eight. In order to devote himself altogether to the woman he loved, my father sent me to England and bought the lodge in which your mother, who lived in the big house next door, used to go and see him, crossing the lane and using the same key for both doors. It was no doubt in this lodge, or in the garden round it, that they were murdered. We shall find that out, because there must be visible proofs of the murder, proofs which Siméon Diodokis discovered, since he was not afraid to say so in the inscription on the tombstone.”

“And who was the murderer?” Coralie asked, under her breath.

“You suspect it, Coralie, as I do. The hated name comes to your mind, even though we have no grounds for speaking with certainty.”

“Essarès!” she cried, in anguish.

“Most probably.”

She hid her face in her hands:

“No, no, it is impossible. It is impossible that I should have been the wife of the man who killed my mother.”

“You bore his name, but you were never his wife. You told him so the evening before his death, in my presence. Let us say nothing that we are unable to say positively; but all the same let us remember that he was your evil genius. Remember also that Siméon, my father’s friend and executor, the man who bought the lovers’ lodge, the man who swore upon their tomb to avenge them: remember that Siméon, a few months after your mother’s death, persuaded Essarès to engage him as caretaker of the estate, became his secretary and gradually made his way into Essarès’ life. His only object must have been to carry out a plan of revenge.”

“There has been no revenge.”

“What do we know about it? Do we know how Essarès met his death? Certainly it was not Siméon who killed him, as Siméon was at the hospital. But he may have caused him to be killed. And revenge has a thousand ways of manifesting itself. Lastly, Siméon was most likely obeying instructions that came from my father. There is little doubt that he wanted first to achieve an aim which my father and your mother had at heart: the union of our destinies, Coralie. And it was this aim that ruled his life. It was he evidently who placed among the knick-knacks which I collected as a child this amethyst of which the other half formed a bead in your rosary. It was he who collected our photographs. He lastly was our unknown friend and protector, the one who sent me the key, accompanied by a letter which I never received, unfortunately.”

“Then, Patrice, you no longer believe that he is dead, this unknown friend, or that you heard his dying cries?”

“I cannot say. Siméon was not necessarily acting alone. He may have had a confidant, an assistant in the work which he undertook. Perhaps it was this other man who died at nineteen minutes past seven. I cannot say. Everything that happened on that ill-fated morning remains involved in the deepest mystery. The only conviction that we are able to hold is that for twenty years Siméon Diodokis has worked unobtrusively and patiently on our behalf, doing his utmost to defeat the murderer, and that Siméon Diodokis is alive. Alive, but mad!” Patrice added. “So that we can neither thank him nor question him about the grim story which he knows or about the dangers that threaten you.”

Patrice resolved once more to make the attempt, though he felt sure of a fresh disappointment. Siméon had a bedroom, next to that occupied by two of the wounded soldiers, in the wing which formerly contained the servants’ quarters. Here Patrice found him.

He was sitting half-asleep in a chair turned towards the garden. His pipe was in his mouth; he had allowed it to go out. The room was small, sparsely furnished, but clean and light. Hidden from view, the best part of the old man’s life was spent here. M. Masseron had often visited the room, in Siméon’s absence, and so had Patrice, each from his own point of view.

The only discovery worthy of note consisted of a crude diagram in pencil, on the white wall-paper behind a chest of drawers: three lines intersecting to form a large equilateral triangle. In the middle of this geometrical figure were three words clumsily inscribed in adhesive gold-leaf:

The Golden Triangle

There was nothing more, not another clue of any kind, to further M. Masseron’s search.

Patrice walked straight up to the old man and tapped him on the shoulder:

“Siméon!” he said.

The other lifted his yellow spectacles to him, and Patrice felt a sudden wish to snatch away this glass obstacle which concealed the old fellow’s eyes and prevented him from looking into his soul and his distant memories. Siméon began to laugh foolishly.

“So this,” thought Patrice, “is my friend and my father’s friend. He loved my father, respected his wishes, was faithful to his memory, raised a tomb to him, prayed on it and swore to avenge him. And now his mind has gone.”

Patrice felt that speech was useless. But, though the sound of his voice roused no echo in that wandering brain, it was possible that the eyes were susceptible to a reminder. He wrote on a clean sheet of paper the words that Siméon had gazed upon so often:

Patrice and Coralie
14 April, 1895

The old man looked, shook his head and repeated his melancholy, foolish chuckle.

The officer added a new line:

Armand Belval

The old man displayed the same torpor. Patrice continued the test. He wrote down the names of Essarès Bey and Colonel Fakhi. He drew a triangle. The old man failed to understand and went on chuckling.

But suddenly his laughter lost some of its childishness. Patrice had written the name of Bournef, the accomplice, and this time the old secretary appeared to be stirred by a recollection. He tried to get up, fell back in his chair, then rose to his feet again and took his hat from a peg on the wall.

He left his room and, followed by Patrice, marched out of the house and turned to the left, in the direction of Auteuil. He moved like a man in a trance who is hypnotized into walking without knowing where he is going. He led the way along the Rue de Boulainvilliers, crossed the Seine and turned down the Quai de Grenelle with an unhesitating step. Then, when he reached the boulevard, he stopped, putting out his arm, made a sign to Patrice to do likewise. A kiosk hid them from view. He put his head round it. Patrice followed his example.

Opposite, at the corner of the boulevard and a side-street, was a café, with a portion of the pavement in front of it marked out by dwarf shrubs in tubs. Behind these tubs four men sat drinking. Three of them had their backs turned to Patrice. He saw the only one that faced him, and he at once recognized Bournef.

By this time Siméon was some distance away, like a man whose part is played and who leaves it to others to complete the work. Patrice looked round, caught sight of a post-office and went in briskly. He knew that M. Masseron was at the Rue Raynouard. He telephoned and told him where Bournef was. M. Masseron replied that he would come at once.

Since the murder of Essarès Bey, M. Masseron’s enquiry had made no progress in so far as Colonel Fakhi’s four accomplices were concerned. True, they discovered the man Grégoire’s sanctuary and the bedrooms with the wall-cupboards; but the whole place was empty. The accomplices had disappeared.

“Old Siméon,” said Patrice to himself, “was acquainted with their habits. He must have known that they were accustomed to meet at this café on a certain day of the week, at a fixed hour, and he suddenly remembered it all at the sight of Bournef’s name.”

A few minutes later M. Masseron alighted from his car with his men. The business did not take long. The open front of the café was surrounded. The accomplices offered no resistance. M. Masseron sent three of them under a strong guard to the Dépôt and hustled Bournef into a private room.

“Come along,” he said to Patrice. “We’ll question him.”

“Mme. Essarès is alone at the house,” Patrice objected.

“Alone? No. There are all your soldier-men.”

“Yes, but I would rather go back, if you don’t mind. It’s the first time that I’ve left her and I’m justified in feeling anxious.”

“It’s only a matter of a few minutes,” M. Masseron insisted. “One should always take advantage of the fluster caused by the arrest.”

Patrice followed him, but they soon saw that Bournef was not one of those men who are easily put out. He simply shrugged his shoulders at their threats:

“It is no use, sir,” he said, “to try and frighten me. I risk nothing. Shot, do you say? Nonsense! You don’t shoot people in France for the least thing; and we are all four subjects of a neutral country. Tried? Sentenced? Imprisoned? Never! You forget that you have kept everything dark so far; and, when you hushed up the murder of Mustapha, of Fakhi and of Essarès, it was not done with the object of reviving the case for no valid reason. No, sir, I am quite easy. The internment-camp is the worst that can await me.”

“Then you refuse to answer?” said M. Masseron.

“Not a bit of it! I accept internment. But there are twenty different ways of treating a man in these camps, and I should like to earn your favor and, in so doing, make sure of reasonable comfort till the end of the war. But first of all, what do you know?”

“Pretty well everything.”

“That’s a pity: it decreases my value. Do you know about Essarès’ last night?”

“Yes, with the bargain of the four millions. What’s become of the money?”

Bournef made a furious gesture:

“Taken from us! Stolen! It was a trap!”

“Who took it?”

“One Grégoire.”

“Who was he?”

“His familiar, as we have since learnt. We discovered that this Grégoire was no other than a fellow who used to serve as his chauffeur on occasion.”

“And who therefore helped him to convey the bags of gold from the bank to his house.”

“Yes. And we also think, we know . . . Look here, you may as well call it a certainty. Grégoire . . . is a woman.”

“A woman!”

“Exactly. His mistress. We have several proofs of it. But she’s a trustworthy, capable woman, strong as a man and afraid of nothing.”

“Do you know her address?”

“No.”

“As to the gold: have you no clue to its whereabouts, no suspicion?”

“No. The gold is in the garden or in the house in the Rue Raynouard. We saw it being taken in every day for a week. It has not been taken out since. We kept watch every night. The bags are there.”

“No clue either to Essarès’ murderer?”

“No, none.”

“Are you quite sure?”

“Why should I tell a lie?”

“Suppose it was yourself? Or one of your friends?”

“We thought that you would suspect us. Fortunately, we happen to have an alibi.”

“Easy to prove?”

“Impossible to upset.”

“We’ll look into it. So you have nothing more to reveal?”

“No. But I have an idea . . . or rather a question which you will answer or not, as you please. Who betrayed us? Your reply may throw some useful light, for one person only knew of our weekly meetings here from four to five o’clock, one person only, Essarès Bey; and he himself often came here to confer with us. Essarès is dead. Then who gave us away?”

“Old Siméon.”

Bournef started with astonishment:

“What! Siméon? Siméon Diodokis?”

“Yes. Siméon Diodokis, Essarès Bey’s secretary.”

“He? Oh, I’ll make him pay for this, the blackguard! But no, it’s impossible.”

“What makes you say that it’s impossible?’”

“Why, because . . .”

He stopped and thought for some time, no doubt to convince himself that there was no harm in speaking. Then he finished his sentence:

“Because old Siméon was on our side.”

“What’s that you say?” exclaimed Patrice, whose turn it was to be surprised.

“I say and I swear that Siméon Diodokis was on our side. He was our man. It was he who kept us informed of Essarès Bey’s shady tricks. It was he who rang us up at nine o’clock in the evening to tell us that Essarès had lit the furnace of the old hothouses and that the signal of the sparks was going to work. It was he who opened the door to us, pretending to resist, of course, and allowed us to tie him up in the porter’s lodge. It was he, lastly, who paid and dismissed the men-servants.”

“But why? Why this treachery? For the sake of money?”

“No, from hatred. He bore Essarès Bey a hatred that often gave us the shudders.”

“What prompted it?”

“I don’t know. Siméon keeps his own counsel. But it dated a long way back.”

“Did he know where the gold was hidden?” asked M. Masseron.

“No. And it was not for want of hunting to find out. He never knew how the bags got out the cellar, which was only a temporary hiding-place.”

“And yet they used to leave the grounds. If so, how are we to know that the same thing didn’t happen this time?”

“This time we were keeping watch the whole way round outside, a thing which Siméon could not do by himself.”

Patrice now put the question:

“Can you tell us nothing more about him?”

“No, I can’t. Wait, though; there was one rather curious thing. On the afternoon of the great day, I received a letter in which Siméon gave me certain particulars. In the same envelope was another letter, which had evidently got there by some incredible mistake, for it appeared to be highly important.”

“What did it say?” asked Patrice, anxiously.

“It was all about a key.”

“Don’t you remember the details?”

“Here is the letter. I kept it in order to give it back to him and warn him what he had done. Here, it’s certainly his writing. . . .”

Patrice took the sheet of notepaper; and the first thing that he saw was his own name. The letter was addressed to him, as he anticipated: