“See here!  I want to know who has been playing football with me,” was my next demand, which Dunny answered obligingly, if with a slightly dubious face.

“That French doctor, nice young chap, said you weren’t to talk,” he muttered, “but if I were in your place I’d want to know a few things myself.  It was this way, Dev.  A fragment of a shell struck you—­”

“A fragment!” I raised weak eyebrows.  “I know better.  Twenty shells at least, and whole!”

“—­and didn’t strike your Teuton friends,” he charged on, suddenly purple of visage.  “It was a true German shell, my boy, the devil looking after his own.  The man in the seat with you was cut up a bit; the other two were thrown clear of the motor.  If you hadn’t already given the alarm, they would probably have got off scot-free.  As it was, the French held a drumhead court martial a little later, and all three of the fellows—­well, you can fill in the rest.”

I was silent for a minute while a picture rose before me:  a dank, gray dawn; a firing-squad, and Franz von Blenheim’s dark, grim face.  No doubt he had died bravely; but I could not pity him; I had too clear a recollection of the hall at Prezelay.

“As for you,” Dunny was continuing, “you seem to have puzzled them finely.  There you were in a French uniform, at your last gasp apparently, and with an American passport, that you seem to have clung to through thick and thin, inside your coat.  They took a chance on you, though, because you had made them a present of the Franz von Blenheim; and by the next day, thanks to Miss Falconer and the Duke of Raincy-la-Tour, you were being looked for all over France.

“So that’s how it stands.  You’re at Raincy-la-Tour now, at the duke’s chateau.  The place has been a hospital ever since the war began.  Only you’re not with the other wounded.  You are—­well—­a rather special patient in the pavilion across the lake; and you’re by way of being a hero.  The day I landed, the first paper I saw shrieked at me how you had tracked the kaiser’s star agent and outwitted him and handed him over to justice.”

“The deuce it did!” I exclaimed.  “You must have been puffed up with pride.”

My guardian’s jaw set itself rigidly.  “I was too busy,” was his grim answer.  “You see, the end of the statement said there was no hope that you could survive.  And when I got here I found you with fever, delirium, one leg shot up, four bits of shell in your head, a fine case of brain concussion.  That was nearly three weeks ago, and it seems more like three years!”

An idea, at this point, made me fix a searching gaze on him.

“By the way,” I asked accusingly, “how did you happen to arrive so opportunely on this side?  It seemed as natural as possible to find you settled here waiting for my eyes to open; but on second thoughts I suppose you didn’t fly?”

He looked extraordinarily embarrassed.

“Why,” he growled at length, “I had business.  I got a cablegram soon after you left New York.  The thing was confoundedly inconvenient, but I had no choice about it.”