“Baron de Carjorac?  Do you mean the French Minister of the Interior, the President of the Board of National Defences, Miss Lorne—­that enthusiastic old patriot, that rabid old spitfire, whose one dream is the wresting back of Alsace-Lorraine, the driving of the hated Germans into the sea?  Do you mean that ripping old firebrand?”

“Yes.  But you’d not call him that if you were to see him now; if you could see the wreck, the broken and despairing wreck, that six weeks of the Chateau Larouge, six weeks of that horrible ‘Red Crawl’ have made of him.”

“‘The Red Crawl’!  Good heavens! then that letter, that appeal for help—­”

“Came from him!” she finished excitedly.  “It was he who was to have met you here to-night, Mr. Cleek.  This house is one he owns; he thought he might with safety risk coming here, but—­he can’t! he can’t!  He knows now that there is danger for him everywhere; that his every step is tracked; that the snare which is about him has been about him, unsuspected, for almost a year; that he dare not, absolutely dare not, appeal to the French police, and that if it were known he had appealed to you, he would be a dead man inside of twenty-four hours, and not only dead, but—­disgraced.  Oh, Mr. Cleek!”—­she stretched out two shaking hands and laid them on his arm, lifted a white, imploring face to his—­“save him! save that dear broken old man!  Ah, think! think!  They are our friends, our dear country’s friends, these French people.  Their welfare is our welfare, ours is theirs.  Oh, help him, save him, Mr. Cleek—­for his own sake—­for mine—­for France.  Save him, and win my gratitude for ever!”

“That is a temptation that would carry me to the ends of the earth, Miss Lorne.  Tell me what the work is, and I will carry it through.  What is this incomprehensible thing of which both you and Baron de Carjorac have spoken—­this thing you allude to as ’The Red Crawl’?”

She gave a little shuddering cry and fell back a step, covering her face with both hands.

“Oh!” she said, with a shiver of repulsion.  “It is loathly—­it is horrible—­it is necromancy—­beyond belief!  Why, oh, why were we ever driven to that horrible Chateau Larouge!  Why could not fate have spared the Villa de Carjorac?  It could not have happened then!”

“Villa de Carjorac?  That was the name of the baron’s residence, I believe.  I remember reading in the newspapers some five or six weeks ago that it was destroyed by fire, which originated—­nobody knew how—­in the apartments of the late baroness in the very dead of the night.  I thought at the time it read suspiciously like the work of an incendiary, although nobody hinted at such a thing.  The Chateau Larouge I also have a distinct memory of, as an old historic property in the neighbourhood of St. Cloud.  Speaking from past experience, I know that, although it is in such a state of decay, and supposed to be uninhabitable, it has, in fact, often been occupied at a period when the police and