It was a gold seal ring, a small, dainty thing that bore a crest:  a bell, surmounted by a bishop’s mitre—­the bell, quaint in design, harking the imagination back to some old-time belfry tower.  And underneath, in the scroll—­a motto.  It was a full minute before Jimmie Dale could decipher it, for the lettering was minute and the words, of course, reversed.  It was in French:  Sonnez le Tocsin.

He straightened up, the glove and ring in his hand, a puzzled expression on his face.  It was strange!  Had she, after all, dropped the glove there intentionally; had she at last let down the barriers just a little between them, and given him this little intimate sign that she—­

And then Jimmie Dale laughed abruptly, self-mockingly.  He was only trying to deceive himself, to argue himself into believing what, with heart and soul, he wanted to believe.  It was not like her—­and neither was it so!  His eyes had fixed on the seat beside the wheel.  He had not used the lap rug all that day, he couldn’t use a rug and drive, he had left it folded and hanging on the rack in the tonneau—­it was now neatly folded and reposing on the front seat!

“Yes,” said Jimmie Dale, a sort of self-pity in his tones, “I might have known.”

He lifted the rug.  Beneath it on the leather seat lay a white envelope.  Her letter!  The letter that never came save with the plan of some grim, desperate work outlined ahead—­the call to arms for the Gray Seal.  Sonnez le Tocsin!  Ring the Tocsin!  Sound the alarm!  The Tocsin!  The words were running through his brain.  A strange motto on that crest—­that seemed so strangely apt!  The Tocsin!  Never once in all the times that he had heard from her, never once in the years that had gone since that initial letter of hers had struck its first warning note, had any communication from her been but to sound again a new alarm—­the Toscin!  The Tocsin—­the word seemed to visualise her, to give her a concrete form and being, to breathe her very personality.

“The Tocsin!”—­Jimmie Dale whispered the word softly, a little wistfully.  “Yes; I shall call you that—­the Tocsin!”

He folded the glove very carefully, placed it with the ring in his pocketbook, picked up the letter—­and, with a sharp exclamation, turned it quickly over in his fingers, then bent hurriedly with it to the light.

Strange things were happening that night!  For the first time, the letter was not even sealed!  That was not like her, either!  What did it mean?  Quick, alert now, anxious even, he pulled the double, folded sheets from the envelope, glanced rapidly through them—­and, after a moment, a smile, whimsical, came slowly to his lips.

It was quite plain now—­all of it.  The glove, the ring, and the unsealed letter—­and the postscript held the secret; or, rather, what had been intended for a postscript did, for it comprised only a few words, ending abruptly, unfinished:  “Look in the cupboard at the rear of the room.  The man with the red wig is—­” That was all, and the words, written in ink, were badly blurred, as though the paper had been hastily folded before the ink was dry.