The list of the tenants was before me.  There was a second American, an Englishman called Halford, a Paris Jew-banker, and an Egyptian prince.  But the space for 1913 was blank, and I asked the clerk about it.  He told me that it had been taken by a woollen manufacturer from Lille, but he had never shot the partridges, though he had spent occasional nights in the house.  He had a five years’ lease, and was still paying rent to the Marquise.  I asked the name, but the clerk had forgotten.  ‘It will be written there,’ he said.

‘But, no,’ I said.  ’Somebody must have been asleep over this register.  There’s nothing after 1912.’

He examined the page and blinked his eyes.  ’Someone indeed must have slept.  No doubt it was young Louis who is now with the guns in Champagne.  But the name will be on the Commissary’s list.  It is, as I remember, a sort of Flemish.’

He hobbled off and returned in five minutes.

‘Bommaerts,’ he said, ’Jacques Bommaerts.  A young man with no wife but with money—­Dieu de Dieu, what oceans of it!’

That clerk got twenty-five francs, and he was cheap at the price.  I went back to my division with a sense of awe on me.  It was a marvellous fate that had brought me by odd routes to this out-of-the-way corner.  First, the accident of Hamilton’s seeing Gresson; then the night in the Clearing Station; last the mishap of Archie’s plane getting lost in the fog.  I had three grounds of suspicion—­Gresson’s sudden illness, the Canadian’s ghost, and that horrid old woman in the dusk.  And now I had one tremendous fact.  The place was leased by a man called Bommaerts, and that was one of the two names I had heard whispered in that far-away cleft in the Coolin by the stranger from the sea.

A sensible man would have gone off to the contre-espionage people and told them his story.  I couldn’t do this; I felt that it was my own private find and I was going to do the prospecting myself.  Every moment of leisure I had I was puzzling over the thing.  I rode round by the Chateau one frosty morning and examined all the entrances.  The main one was the grand avenue with the locked gates.  That led straight to the front of the house where the terrace was—­or you might call it the back, for the main door was on the other side.  Anyhow the drive came up to the edge of the terrace and then split into two, one branch going to the stables by way of the outbuildings where I had seen the old woman, the other circling round the house, skirting the moat, and joining the back road just before the bridge.  If I had gone to the right instead of the left that first evening with Archie, I should have circumnavigated the place without any trouble.