Ten minutes later the hotel register bore the record of the arrival of “Mr. Philip Barch and servant”; and one attendant was engaged in showing the servant into a neat little bedroom which was to be his resting-place until morning while another was ushering the master into the suite engaged by the Baron de Carjorac.

Three persons were there:  the Baron, his daughter, and his daughter’s companion; but Cleek saw but one—­and that the only one who made no movement, uttered no sound, when he came into the room.  Curiously pale and curiously quiet, she stood with one arm resting on the mantelpiece and the other hanging by her side, looking at him—­looking for him, in fact—­but not saying one word, not making one sound.  That she left wholly to the baron and his daughter.

They, too, maintained, although with an effort, an appearance of composure so long as the hotel servant was present; but in the moment the door closed and the man was gone an overpowering excitement seized and mastered them.

“Monsieur, for the love of God, don’t tell me you have failed,” implored the baron.  “I have died a hundred deaths of torture and suspense since your card was carried up.  But if I am to hear bad news ...  Oh, my country!”

“Don’t cross bridges, baron, until you come to them,” said Cleek composedly.  “I gave Miss Lorne my promise that I would not leave France until I had done what she asked me to do; and—­I am returning to England to-morrow by the noon boat.  I have had an exciting evening, but it has had its compensation.  Here is something for you.  I had a bit of a fight for it, baron—­look out that it doesn’t get into the wrong hands again.”

He had taken a small packet of torn papers from his pocket while he was speaking; now he put it into the baron’s hand—­not wholly without a certain sense of gratification, however, in the excitement and delight which the act called forth; for no man is utterly devoid of personal vanity, personal pride in his achievements, and this man was no less human than his kind.

He let the tumult of excitement and joy wear itself out; he suffered the baron’s embraces—­even the two rapturous kisses the man planted upon first one and then the other of his cheeks—­he endured Mlle. Athalie’s exuberant hand-clapping and hand-shaking and the cyclonic and wholly Gallic manner in which she deported herself when comparison with the fragments which the baron had still retained proved beyond all question that these were indeed the missing portions of the all-important document; and not until these things were over did he so much as look at Ailsa Lorne again.

She had taken no part in the general excitement, moved not one foot from where she had been standing from the first.  Even when Athalie danced over and hugged her and showed the important fragments; even when she reproved her with a wondering, “Ah, you strange Anglais—­you stone-cold Anglais!  Is it possible that you can have blood in your veins and yet take wondrous things like this so calmly?”—­even then, she merely smiled and remained standing just as she still was; her pallor not one whit lessened, her reserve but the merest shadow less apparent than it had been before.