The meaning of the scheme was clear.  Jacqueline was on Captain Duhamel’s boat, which sailed at nine.  And only twenty minutes remained to me.  If I had not had the good luck to meet Dubois!

I must have noticed a clock somewhere during the minute that I was in the chateau, and though I had not been conscious of it, the after-image loomed before my eyes.  As I ran now I could see a huge phantom clock, the dial marked with enormous Roman letters, and the hands moving with dreadful swiftness toward the hour of nine.

I had underestimated Leroux’s shrewdness.  He must have telegraphed instructions from New York before my train was out of the county, secured the boat, laid his plans during his journey northward, and had me struck down while Jacqueline was stolen from my care.  And he had spared no details, even to enlisting the aid of Pere Antoine.

If he had known that my destination was the same as his, he might have waited.  But it was not the character of the man to wait, any more than it was to participate personally in his schemes.  He worked through others, sitting back and pulling the strings, and he struck, each blow on time.

I ought to have known that.  I should have read him better.  I had always dawdled.  I trusted to the future, instead of acting.  What chance had I against a mind like his?

I was a novice at chess, pitting myself against a master at the game.

I must have been running aimlessly up and down the terrace, blindly searching for a road down to the lower town, for a man seized me by the sleeve, and I looked into the face of the hotel clerk again.  He seemed to realize that more was the matter even than my appearance indicated, for he asked no questions, but apparently divined my movements.

“This way!” he said, and hurried me to a sort of subway entrance, and down a flight of steps.  Before me I saw the turnstile which led to a cable railway.  He paid my fare and thrust me into a car.  A boy came to close the latticed door.

“Wait!” I gasped.  “Who was it that called?”

“The man with the mustache who asked for you—­about whom you inquired.”

I turned away.  I had thought it was Leroux.  Of course it had not been he.

The car glided down the cliff, and stopped a few seconds later, I emerged through another turnstile and found myself in the lower town again at the foot of the precipice, above which rose the chateau with its imposing facade, the ramparts, and the towering citadel.

The hands of the phantom clock pointed to ten minutes of nine.  But I knew the gulf lay before me at the end of the short, narrow street that led down to it, up which I had passed two hours before upon that journey which so nearly ended in the snow-drifts of Souse-le-Cap.

I reached the wharf and raced along the planks.  I was in time, although the engines were throbbing in the Sainte-Vierge.  But it was not she, but the dark Claire I sought at that moment, and I dashed toward her.