the tavern of Fouchard, and lay in hiding there.  Fouchard let his son carry a message to the count for me, and will guide him to the square.  When it grew near the time to come, Fouchard let me down into the sewer passage from there.  Get on with your dance—­silence is always suspicious.  An absinthe, Marise!  Have Gaston and Serpice arrived yet with the rest of the document, Margot la reine?”

“Not yet,” she answered.  “But one may expect them at any minute.”

“Where is the fragment we already possess?”

“Here,” tapping her bodice and laughing, “tenderly shielded, mon ami, and why not?  Who would not mother a thing that is to bring one four hundred thousand francs?”

“Let me see it.  It must be shown to the count, remember.  He will take no risks, come not one step beyond the square, until he is certain that it is the paper his Government requires.  Let me have it—­let me take it to him—­quick!”

She waved aside airily the hand he stretched toward her, and danced into the thick of the resumed quadrille.

“Ah, non! non! non!” she laughed, as he came after her.  “The conditions were of your own making, cher ami; we break no rules even among ourselves.”

“Soul of a fool!  But if the count comes to the square—­he is due there now, mignonne—­and I am not there to show him the thing—­Margot, for the love of God, let me have the paper!”

“Let me have the sign, the password!”

Cleek snapped at a desperate chance because there was nothing else to do, because he knew that at any moment now the end might come.

“‘When the purse will not open, slit it!’” he hazarded, desperately—­choosing, on the off-chance of its correctness, the password of the Apache.

“It is not the right one!  It is by no means the right one!” she made reply, backing away from him suddenly, her absinthe-brightened eyes deriding him, her absinthe-sharpened laughter mocking him.  “Your thoughts are in the Bois, cher ami.  What is the password of the brotherhood to the cause of Germany, stupid?  It is not right, non! non!  It is not right!”

The cause of Germany!  At the words the truth rushed like a flash of inspiration across Cleek’s mind.  The cause of Germany!  What a dolt he was not to have thought of that before!  There was but one phrase ever used for that among the Kaiser’s people, and that phrase—­

“‘To the day!’” he said, with a burst of sudden laughter.  “My wits are in the moon to-night, la reine.  ‘To the day,’ of course—­’To the day!’” And even before she replied to him, he knew that he had guessed aright.

“Bravo!” she said, with a little hiccough—­for the absinthe, of which she had imbibed so freely to-night, was beginning to take hold of her.  “A pretty conspirator to forget how to open the door he himself locked!  It is well I know thee—­it is well it was the word of les Apaches in the beginning, or I had been suspicious, silly!  Wait but a moment!”—­putting her hand to her breast and beginning to unfasten her bodice—­“wait but a moment, Monsieur Twitching-Fingers, and the thing shall be in your hand.”