I felt very cheerful, very contented, as my taxi bore me into old Paris.  The ancient streets, had a decided lure and charm.  Now we passed a quaint church, now a dim and winding alley, now a house with mansard windows or a portal of carved stone.  On all sides were buildings that in the old days had been the hotels of famous gentry, this one sheltering a Montmorency, that one a Clisson or Soubise.  It was just the setting for a romance by Dumas.  And, with a chuckle, I felt myself in sudden sympathy with that writer’s heroes, none of whom had, it seemed to me, been enmeshed in a mystery more baffling or involved than mine.

“They’ve got nothing on my affair,” I decided, “with their masks and poisoned drinks and swords.  For a fellow who leads a cut-and-dried existence generally, I’ve been having quite a lively time.  And now, to cap the climax, I’m going to call on a girl about whom I know just one thing—­her name.  By Jove, it’s exactly like a story!  I’ve got the data.  If I had any gray matter I could probably work out the facts.

“Take the St. Ives business.  It’s plain enough that some one wished those papers on me, intending to unwish them in short order once we got across.  The logical suspect, judging by appearances, was Miss Falconer.  The little German went out through her room; she was the one person I saw both at the hotel and on the Re d’Italia; and she acted in a suspicious manner that first night aboard the ship.  But she says she didn’t do it, and probably she didn’t; it seemed infernally odd, all along, for her to be a spy.

“Still, if she is innocent, who can be responsible?  And if that affair didn’t bring her over here, what the dickens did?  Something mysterious, something dangerous, something that the French police wouldn’t appreciate, but that her conscience sanctions—­that is all she deigns to say.  And why on earth did she ask me to destroy that extra?  I thought it was because she was Franz von Blenheim’s agent and the paper had an account of him that might have served as a clue to her.  She says, though, that she never heard of him.  And I may be all kinds of a fool, but it sounded straight.

“Then, there’s Van Blarcom, hang him!  He seemed to take a fancy to me.  He warned me about the girl, but he kept a still tongue to Captain Cecchi and the rest.  He lied deliberately, for no earthly reason, to shield me in that interrogation; yet when those papers materialized in my trunk, though he must have thought just what I thought as to Miss Falconer’s share in it, he didn’t breathe a word.  He claimed that he had met her.  She said she had never seen him.  And then—­rather strong for a coincidence—­we all three met again on the express.  What is he doing on this side?  Shadowing her?  Nonsense?  And yet he seemed almighty keen about her—­Oh, hang it!  I’m no Sherlock Holmes!”

The taxi pausing at this juncture, I willingly abandoned my attempt at sleuthing and got out in the highest spirits compatible with a strictly correct mien.  I dismissed my driver.  If asked to remain to dejeuner, I should certainly do so.  Then, with feelings of natural interest, I gazed at the house before which I stood.