A choked, frightened cry from Miss Falconer made me wheel about sharply, to find her staring not a me, but at the further wall.  Prepared now for anything under heaven, I followed her gaze.  Above us, circling the whole hall, there ran a gallery from which at a distance of some fifteen feet from where we stood a wide stone staircase descended; and half-way down this, as motionless as statues, as indistinct as shadows, I saw four men in the uniform of officers of France.

For an uncanny moment I wondered whether they were specters.  For a stupid one, I thought they might be people whom the girl had come here to meet.  Still, if they were, she wouldn’t be looking at them in this paralyzed fashion.  I could not see them plainly,—­but they must be the men from Bleau.

“Well, Mr. Bayne,” the foremost was asking, “did you think we had deserted you?  Not a bit of it!  We came on ahead and rang up the old woman there and commandeered her keys.  We’ve been killing time here for a good half hour, waiting for you.  You must have had tire trouble.  And you don’t seem very pleased to see us now that you’ve come—­eh, what?”

At Bleau the previous night, I was recalling dazedly, there had been only three men wearing the horizon blue.  Who was this fourth figure, who knew my name and spoke such colloquial English?  I raised my candle as high as possible and scanned him.  Then I stood transfixed.

“Van Blarcom!” I gasped.  “And in a uniform, by all that’s holy!”

He grinned.

“No.  You haven’t got that quite right,” he told me.  “What’s the use keeping up the game now that we’re here, all friends together?  My name isn’t Van Blarcom.  It’s Franz von Blenheim, Mr. Bayne.”

CHAPTER XX

INTRODUCING HERR FRANZ VON BLENHEIM

The words of Franz von Blenheim seemed to fill the hall and reecho from the walls and arches, deafening me, leaving me stunned as if by an earthquake or by a flash of lightning from clear skies.  Yet I never though of doubting them.  Comatose as my state was, slowly as my brain was working, I recognized vaguely how many features of the mystery, both past and present, these words explained.

It was odd, but never once had it occurred to me that Van Blarcom might be a German.  He himself, I began to realize, had taken care of that.  With considerable acumen he had filled every one of our brief interviews with vigorous denunciations of somebody else, dark hints as to intrigues that surrounded me and might enmesh me, and solemn warnings and prudent counsels, which had brilliantly served his turn.  He had kept me so busy suspecting Miss Falconer—­at the thought I could have beaten my head against the wall in token of my abject shame—­that my doubts had never glanced in his direction; a most humiliating confession, since I couldn’t deny, reviewing the past in this new light, that circumstances had afforded me every opportunity to guess the truth.