bridge, do as I do," he directed, dipping his hand into the flour and sprinkling the white powder lightly over the flagstone pavement of the chapel. "Back away toward the door," he commanded, "and on no account leave a footprint in the meal. We must have a fair, unsoiled page for our records."
Wonderingly, but willingly, I helped him spread a film of flour ever the chapel floor from altar-step to doorway, then turned upon hint with a question: "What do you expect to find in this meal, de Grandin? Surely not footprints. No one who did not have to would come to this ghastly place."
He nodded seriously at me as he picked up his lantern and the remains of the package of flour. "Partly right and partly wrong you are, my friend. One may come who must, one may come who wants. Tomorrow, perhaps, we shall know more than we do today."
7
I was in the midst of my toilet, when he burst into my bedroom next morning, feline mustache bristling, his round eyes fairly snapping with excitement. "Come, mon vieux," he urged, tugging at iny arm as a nervous terrier might have urged his master to go for a romp, "come and see; right away, quick, at once, immediately!"
We hastened through the chateau's modern wing, passed the doors blocking the corridors of the Fifteenth Century buildings and came at last to the Eleventh Century chapel. De Grandin paused before the oak-and-iron door like a showman about to raise the curtain from an exhibit as he lit the candle in his lantern, and I heard his small, even teeth clicking together in a chill of suppressed excitement. "Behold, mon ami," he commanded in a hoarse whisper more expressive of emotion than a shout, "behold what writings are on the page which we did prepare!"
I looked through the arched doorway, then turned to him, dumb with surprize.
Leading from the chapel entrance, and ending at the center of the floor, directly before the altar, was the unmistakable trail of little, naked feet. No woodcraft was needed to trace the walker's course. She had entered the sanctuary, marched straight and unswervingly to a spot about fifteen feet from the altar, but directly before it, then turned about slowly in a tiny circle, no more than two feet in diameter, for at that point the footprints were so superimposed on each other that all individual traces were lost.
But the other track which showed in the strewn flour was less easily explained. Beginning at a point directly opposite the place the footprints ceased, this other trail ran some three or four inches wide in a lazy zigzag, as though a single automobile wheel had been rolled in on uncertain course across the floor by someone staggeringly drunk. But no prints of feet followed the wheel-track. The thing had apparently traversed the floor of its own volition.
"See," de Grandin whispered, "flour-prints lead away from the door"—he pointed to a series of white prints, plainly describing bare heels and toes, leading up the passage from the chapel door, diminishing in clearness with each step until they faded out some ten paces toward the modern part of the chateau. "And see," he repeated, drawing me inside the chapel to the wall where the other, inexplicable, track began, "a trail leads outward here, too."
Following his pointing finger with my eye I saw what I had not noticed before, a cleft in the chapel wall some five inches wide, evidently the result of crumbling cement and gradnally
