“All right,” nodded Lloyd, and as he turned to Alice, she saw tears in his eyes.  “It’s tough, but never mind.  You’ve made a man of me, little one, and I’ll prove it.  I used to have a sort of religion and then I lost it, and now I’ve got it again, a new religion and a new creed.  It’s short and easy to say, but it’s all I need, and it’s going to keep me game through this whole rotten business.  Want to hear my creed?  You know it already, darling, for you taught it to me.  Here it is:  ‘I believe in Alice’; that’s all, that’s enough.  Let me kiss you.”

“Lloyd,” she whispered as he bent toward her, “can’t you trust me with that woman’s name?”

He drew back and looked at her half reproachfully and her cheeks flushed.  She would not have him think that she could bargain for her lips, and throwing her arms about him, she murmured:  “Kiss me, kiss me as much as you like.  I am yours, yours.”

Then there was a long, delicious, agonizing moment of passion and pain until the guard’s gruff voice came between them.

“One moment,” Kittredge said, and then to the clinging girl:  “Why do you ask that woman’s name when you know it already?”

Wide-eyed, she faced him and shook her head.  “I don’t know her name, I don’t want to know it.”

“You don’t know her name?” he repeated, and even in the tumult of their last farewell her frank and honest denial lingered in his mind.

She did not know the woman’s name!  Back in his lonely cell Kittredge pondered this, and reaching for his little volume of De Musset, his treasured pocket companion that the jailer had let him keep, he opened it at the fly leaves. She did not know this woman’s name! And, wonderingly, he read on the white page the words and the name written by Alice herself, scrawlingly but distinctly, the day before in the garden of Notre-Dame.

CHAPTER XIV

THE WOMAN IN THE CASE

Coquenil was neither surprised nor disappointed at the meager results of Alice’s visit to the prison.  This was merely one move in the game, and it had not been entirely vain, since he had learned that Kittredge might have used his left hand in firing a pistol and that he did not suffer with gout or rheumatism.  This last point was of extreme importance.

And the detective was speedily put in excellent humor by news awaiting him at the Palais de Justice Monday morning that the man sent to London to trace the burned photograph and the five-pound notes had already met with success and had telegraphed that the notes in question had been issued to Addison Wilmott, whose bankers were Munroe and Co., Rue Scribe.

Quick inquiries revealed the fact that Addison Wilmott was a well-known New Yorker, living in Paris, a man of leisure who was enjoying to the full a large inherited fortune.  He and his dashing wife lived in a private hotel on the Avenue Kleber, where they led a gay existence in the smartest and most spectacular circle of the American Colony.  They gave brilliant dinners, they had several automobiles, they did all the foolish and extravagant things that the others did and a few more.