“Yes,” the girl assented, gazing across the water.  “They came here at the beginning of the war.  They burned the houses and the huts and the little church with the image of the Virgin and the tomb of the old constable—­all Prezelay except the chateau; and they only left that standing to give their officers a home.”

With an automatic action of feet and fingers, I stopped the car.  Here was the town that she had shown me on the map that morning when we sat like a pair of whispering conspirators in the garden of the Three Kings.  The obstacles which had seemed so great had melted away before us.  This ruined village, this heap of stones cross the river, was our goal, the key to our mystery, the last scene of our drama—­Prezelay.

CHAPTER XIX

THE CASTLE AT PREZELAY

In the midst of my triumph, which was as intense as if I myself, instead of pure luck, had engineered our journey, I became aware of a tiny qualm as I sat gazing across the stream.  Perhaps the gathering night affected me, or the air, which was growing chilly, or the remnants of the village, which were cheerless, to say the least.  But that castle, perched so darkly on its crag, with a strip of blood-red sky framing it, was at the heart of my feeling.  If it had been a nice, worldly-looking, well-kept chateau, with poplared walks and a formal garden, I should have welcomed it with open arms; but it wasn’t, decidedly!  It was the threatening age-blackened sort of place that inevitably suggests Fulc of Anjou, strongholds on the Loire, marauding barons, and the good old days with their concomitants of rapine and robbery and death.

It was picturesque, but it was intensely gloomy; the proper spot for a catastrophe rather than a happy denouement.  I was not impressionable, of course; but now that I thought of it, our jaunt had been going with a smoothness almost ominous.  Could one expect such clock-like regularity to run forever without a break?

Take the utter disappearance of the gray car, for instance.  That had seemed to me reassuring; but was it?  Those four men had cared enough about Miss Falconer’s movements to involve themselves in a murder.  Why, then, should they have given up the chase in so mysterious a way?

And the girl herself!  When I looked at her I felt horribly worried.  She was shivering through her furs; yet it was not with the cold, I felt quite sure.  With her hands clasped, she sat staring at that confounded castle with a look of actual hunger.  She cared too much about this thing; she couldn’t stand a great deal more.

Well, she wouldn’t have to, I concluded, my brief misgivings fading.  We were out of the woods; another hour would see the business closed.  As for the men in the car, they were victims of their guilty consciences, were no doubt in full flight or hiding somewhere in terror of the law.

At any rate, there was no point in my sitting here like a graven image; so I roused myself and wrapped the rugs closer about the girl.