Davanne was ready.  Don Luis climbed into the monoplane.  The peasants pushed at the wheels.  The machine started.

“North-northeast,” Don Luis ordered.  “Ninety miles an hour.  Ten thousand francs.”

“We’ve the wind against us,” said Davanne.

“Five thousand francs extra for the wind,” shouted Don Luis.

He admitted no obstacle in his haste to reach Damigni.  He now understood the whole thing and, harking back to the very beginning, he was surprised that his mind had never perceived the connection between the two skeletons hanging in the barn and the series of crimes resulting from the Mornington inheritance.  Stranger still, how was it that the almost certain murder of Langernault, Hippolyte Fauville’s old friend, had not afforded him all the clues which it contained?  The crux of the sinister plot lay in that.

Who could have intercepted, on Fauville’s behalf, the letters of accusation which Fauville was supposed to write to his old friend Langernault, except some one in the village or some one who had lived in the village?

And now everything was clear.  It was the nameless scoundrel who had started his career of crime by killing old Langernault and then the Dedessuslamare couple.  The method was the same as later on:  it was not direct murder, but anonymous murder, murder by suggestion.  Like Mornington the American, like Fauville the engineer, like Marie, like Gaston Sauverand, old Langernault had been craftily done away with and the Dedessuslamare couple driven to commit suicide in the barn.

It was from there that the tiger had come to Paris, where later he was to find Fauville and Cosmo Mornington and plot the tragic affair of the inheritance.

And it was there that he was now returning!

There was no doubt about that.  To begin with, the fact that he had administered a narcotic to Florence constituted an indisputable proof.  Was he not obliged to put Florence to sleep in order to prevent her from recognizing the landscape at Alencon and Damigni, or the Old Castle, which she had explored with Gaston Sauverand?

On the other hand, the Le Mans-Angers-Nantes route, which had been taken to put the police on a false track, meant only an extra hour or two, at most, for any one motoring to Alencon.  Lastly, that coach-house near a big town, that limousine waiting, ready charged with petrol, showed that the villain, when he intended to visit his retreat, took the precaution of stopping at Le Mans, in order to go from there, in his limousine, to Langernault’s deserted estate.

He would therefore reach his lair at ten o’clock that morning.  And he would arrive there with Florence Levasseur dead asleep!

The question forced itself upon him, the terrible persistent question—­what did he mean to do with Florence Levasseur?

“Faster!  Faster!” cried Don Luis.

Now that he knew the scoundrel’s haunt, the man’s scheme became hideously evident to him.  Feeling himself hunted down, lost, an object of hatred and terror to Florence, whose eyes were now opened to the true state of things, what plan could he have in mind except his invariable plan of murder?