“Yes,” admitted Ailsa.  “The baron accepted—­Athalie would not have allowed him to decline had he wished to—­so we all three went there and have been residing there ever since.  On the night after our arrival an alarming, a horrifying thing occurred.  It was while we were at dinner that the conversation turned upon the supernatural—­upon houses and places that were reputed to be haunted—­and then Madame la Comtesse made a remarkable statement.  She laughingly asserted that she had just learned that, in purchasing the Chateau Larouge, she had also become the possessor of a sort of family ghost.  She said that she had only just heard—­from an outside source—­that there was a horrible legend connected with the place; in short, that for centuries it had been reputed to be under a sort of spell of evil and to be cursed by a dreadful visitant known as ’The Red Crawl’—­a hideous and loathsome creature, neither spider nor octopus, but horribly resembling both—­which was supposed to ‘appear’ at intervals in the middle of the night, and, like the fabled giants of fairy tales, carry off ’lovely maidens and devour them.’”

“Who is responsible for that ridiculous assertion, I wonder?  I think I may say that I know as much about the Chateau Larouge and its history as anybody, Miss Lorne, but I never heard of this supposed ‘legend’ before in all my life.”

“So the baron, too, declared, laughing as derisively as any of us over the story, although it is well known that he has a natural antipathy to all crawling things—­an abhorrence inherited from his mother—­and has been known to run like a frightened child from the appearance of a mere garden spider.”

“Oho!” said Cleek again.  “I see!  I see!  The toasted cheese smells stronger, and there’s a distinct suggestion of the Rhine about it this time.  There’s something decidedly German about that fabulous ‘monster’ and that haunted chateau, Miss Lorne.  They are clever and careful schemers, those German Johnnies.  Of course, this amazing ‘Red Crawl’ was proved to have an absolute foundation in fact, and equally, of course, it ‘appeared’ to the Baron de Carjorac?”

“Yes—­that very night.  After we had all gone to bed, the house was roused by his screams.  Everybody rushed to his chamber, only to find him lying on the floor in a state of collapse.  The thing had been in his room, he said.  He had seen it—­it had even touched him—­a horrible, hideous red reptile, with squirming tentacles, a huge, glowing body, and eyes like flame.  It had crept upon him out of the darkness—­he knew not from where.  It had seized him, resisted all his wild efforts to tear loose from it, and when he finally sank, overcome and fainting, upon the floor, his last conscious recollection was of the loathsome thing settling down upon his breast and running its squirming ‘feelers’ up and down his body.”

“Of course!  Of course!  That was part of the game.  It was after something.  Something of the utmost importance to German interests.  That’s why the Chateau Larouge was refitted, why the Villa de Carjorac was burnt down, and why this Monsieur Gaston Merode became engaged to Mademoiselle Athalie.”