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Carrefonds is very near Prezelay. It all came to me in a moment. I told her how matters stood and how Enid was dying little by little, just for lack of any sure knowledge.
"But Saint Denis, who helps all Frenchmen, helped me," he smiled "and I was thrown clear." From that thicket where his machine lay hidden it was a mile to Prezelay. He dragged himself over this distance, sometimes on his hands and knees.
"It's kismet, Miss Falconer; it's the hand of Providence, no less. Now, we'll leave these notes in the salle a manger to pay for our lodging, which would have been dear at twopence, and be off, if you please, for Prezelay." She had yielded. We were standing side by side in the silence of the morning, the dimness fading round us, the air taking a golden tinge.
It's in the war country; it's forbidden territory. One has to have safe-conducts, laissez-passers, all sorts of documents to get into that part of France." "I didn't come unprepared," she answered stubbornly. "Before I started I knew just what I should need. I can get as far as the hospital at Carrefonds; and Carrefonds is beyond Prezelay, ten miles nearer to the Front!"
I was silent for a minute while a picture rose before me: a dank, gray dawn; a firing-squad, and Franz von Blenheim's dark, grim face. No doubt he had died bravely; but I could not pity him; I had too clear a recollection of the hall at Prezelay. "As for you," Dunny was continuing, "you seem to have puzzled them finely.
It was a long blue motor, polished to the last notch, deeply cushioned, luxurious, poignantly familiar, the car, in short, that I had pursued to Bleau, and that later, in flat defiance of President Poincare or the Generalissimo of France, or whoever makes army rules and regulations, I had guided through the war zone to the castle of Prezelay.
This ruined village, this heap of stones cross the river, was our goal, the key to our mystery, the last scene of our drama Prezelay. In the midst of my triumph, which was as intense as if I myself, instead of pure luck, had engineered our journey, I became aware of a tiny qualm as I sat gazing across the stream.
"The Germans again!" I said. "Yes," the girl assented, gazing across the water. "They came here at the beginning of the war. They burned the houses and the huts and the little church with the image of the Virgin and the tomb of the old constable all Prezelay except the chateau; and they only left that standing to give their officers a home."
That was considered proof of his treason; but of course I knew that it wasn't. I remembered that the Marquis of Prezelay, Jean's cousin, had a castle on the forest outskirts; I had been to visit it with Jean and Enid. I wondered if he might be there. "The more I thought of it, the likelier it seemed.
"In the lord's room there is a secret hiding-place behind a panel; and if the papers are at Prezelay, they will be there." I took the candle from her, turned to the door, and opened it. "I hope they are," I said. "Let us go and see." The antechamber, the room of the squires, the bedchamber of the lord. Such terms were fascinating; they called up before me a whole picture of feudal life.
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