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The cigarettes were not where he had expected to find them, near one end of a certain table. Duchemin put down the candlestick and moved toward the other end, discovering the box he sought as soon as his back was turned to the light. In the same breath this last went out. He stood for a moment transfixed in astonishment.
On the other hand, the nearest railway station, Combe-Redonde, was equally out of the question, since to gain it one must pass through Nant, where André Duchemin was known, and risk being seen, while at Combe-Redonde itself the station people would be apt to remember the monsieur who had recently created a sensation by despatching a code telegram to London.
A sinister consideration, if any, and one, Duchemin suspected, not unconnected with the much-talked-about jewels of Madame de Montalais... But it was absurd to believe that persons fostering a design of such nature would so deliberately and obviously advertise their purpose!
Amazing facility in impersonation had done the rest; unrecognisable as what he had been, he was to-day flawlessly the incarnation of what he elected to seem Monsieur Duchemin, gentleman, of Paris. Impossible to believe his disguise had been so soon penetrated.... And yet, again, that gossip of the smoking room.... Police work? Or had Ekstrom's creatures picked up his trail once more?
But he did not pretend to himself that he wasn't, quite illogically and with no provocation whatsoever, most vilely prejudiced against the lot of them. "But you must know America, to speak the language as well as you do." Duchemin nodded: "But very slightly, monsieur." "I was wondering ... Somehow I can't get it out of my head I've seen you somewhere before to-day."
Among the injured, Lieutenant Lionel Thackeray, D.S.O., was listed as suffering from concussion of the brain, said to have been contracted through a fall while attempting to aid the launching of a lifeboat. In the long roster of the drowned these names appeared: Bartholomew, Archer London Duchemin, Andre Paris Von Harden, Baron Gustav Amsterdam Osborne, Captain E. W. London
Phinuit had not returned, so there was no present opportunity to take further note of him; though Duchemin first inferred from Mr. Monk's manner, and later learned through a chance remark of his, that Phinuit was his secretary. Upon this Mr. Monk Duchemin concentrated close attention, satisfied that he had here to do with an extraordinary personality, if not one unique. Mr.
The woman who had spoken to him found and fetched it from no great distance; and its contents enabled Duchemin to improvise a tourniquet, and when the flow of blood was checked, a bandage. During the operation d'Aubrac unostentatiously fainted. The young girl caught her breath, a fluttering hiss. "Don't be alarmed, mademoiselle," Duchemin soothed her.
The landlord remembered Duchemin and made believe he didn't, serving the wayfarer with a surly grace the only drink he would admit he had to sell, an atrociously acid cider fit to render the last stage of thirst worse than the first. Duchemin, however, thought it safer than the water of the place, when he had spied out the associations of the well.
As he fell sprawling into the tonneau consciousness departed like a light withdrawn. In the course of two weeks or so Duchemin was able to navigate a wheeled chair, bask on the little balcony outside his bedchamber windows in the Château de Montalais, and even strictly against orders take experimental strolls.
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