across the Channel was to find out the true story of the French girl's death, and not to unravel the mystery of this old and perhaps forgotten crime in the unknown wood. So interested was he that he resolved at any cost of trouble to himself to discover the details of the scene reproduced so often in the child's fevered dreams.
"Who knows whether that may not be the surest way of arriving at the truth about the girl's death?" he argued with himself. "At any rate it is the only way that offers itself at present."
He walked late upon the walls of Dinan, enjoying the quiet of the moonlit scene, hearing the bells chime again and again, silver-clear across the vale, from the monastery where the madmen were dreaming their disjointed dreams, or wandering sane and healed in the spirit-land of the past, amid the faces of friends long dead. He walked late, thinking of a face that had looked at him with trusting eyes in the moment of parting, lovely eyes whose every expression he knew, but most of all that tender pathetic look which had once tried to soothe the agony of loss.
"To serve her and work for her, surely that is enough for a man's bliss," he thought, with a sad, half-satirical smile. "In the good old days of chivalry her knight would have deemed it happiness to bleed and perish for her sake far away in Palestine—glory and honour enough to have worn her colours in his helmet. Are we a meaner race, we men of the present, that we cannot love without hope of reward? Well, I have pledged myself to my crusade. I have put on my lady's colours, and I will work for her as faithfully as if my love were not hopeless. I will prove to her that there is some chivalry still left in this degenerate world, under the modern guise of disinterested friendship."
He started for Paris by the first train next morning, a fourteen hours' journey, a journey of dust and weariness, though the road lay through a fair country, with glimpses of the blue sea, and then by the widening river, till the tall houses and the many church-towers of the great city glimmered whitely before him, under the September moon. He put up at his old resting-place, the Hôtel de Bade, amidst the roar and hustle of the Boulevard; and he set out the next morning after an early breakfast in quest of Monsieur Drubarde's apartment, which was situated in that older and shabbier Paris of the left bank.
Monsieur Drubarde's apartment was on the Quai des Grands Augustins, au cinquième, a rather alarming indication to infirm or elderly legs, but which did not appal Edward Heathcote. He ran up the five flights of a dark wooden staircase, and found himself upon an airy landing, lighted and ventilated by a skylight.
The skylight was half open, and through it Heathcote saw
