“We have lost our candle in the fracas,” I muttered lamely.

“It doesn’t matter.  I have another,” she answered in a soft, unsteady voice.

As she coaxed the light into being, I made a rapid survey.  We were in a room of gray stone, of no great size and quite bare of furnishing, save for a few stone benches built into alcoves in the wall.  The bareness of the scene emphasized our lack of resources.  As a sole ray of hope, I perceived a possible line of retreat if things should grow too warm for us, a door facing the one by which we had come in.

With all the excitement, I had forgotten Mr. Schwartzmann’s bullet, which, I have no doubt, had left me a gory spectacle.  At any rate, I frightened Miss Falconer when the candle-light revealed me.  In an instant she was bending over me, forcing me gently down upon a particularly cold, hard bench.

“They shot you!” she was exclaiming.  Her voice was low, but it held an astonishing protective fierceness.  “They—­they dared to hurt you!  Oh, why didn’t you tell me?  Is it very bad?”

“No! no!” I protested, dabbing futilely at my forehead.  “It isn’t of the least importance.  I assure you it is only a scratch.  In fact,” I groaned, “nobody could hurt my head; it is too solid.  It must be ivory.  If I had had a vestige of intelligence, an iota of it, the palest glimmer, I should have known from the beginning exactly who these fellows were!”

She was sitting beside me now, bending forward, all consoling eagerness.

“That is ridiculous!” she declared.  “How could you guess?”

“Easily enough,” I murmured.  “I had all the clues at Gibraltar.  Why, yesterday, on my way to your house in the rue St.-Dominique, I went over the whole case in the taxi, and still I didn’t see.  I let the fellow confide in me on the ship and warn me on the train and give me a final solemn ultimatum at the inn last night and come on here to frighten you and threaten you—­when just a word to the police would have settled him forever.  By George, I can’t believe it!  I should take a prize at an idiot show.”

She laughed unsteadily.

“I don’t see that,” she answered.  “Why should you have suspected him when even the authorities didn’t guess?  You are not a detective.  You are a—­a very brave, generous gentleman, who trusted a girl against all the evidence and helped her and protected her and risked your life for hers.  Isn’t that enough?  And about their frightening me downstairs—­they didn’t.  You see, Mr. Bayne—­you were there.”

A wisp of red-brown hair had come loose across her forehead.  Her face, flushed and royally grateful, was smiling into mine.  Till that moment I had never dreamed that eyes could be so dazzling.  I thrust my hands deep into my pockets; I felt they were safer so.

“What is it?” she faltered, a little startled, as I rose.

“Nothing—­now,” I replied firmly.  “I’ll tell you later, to-morrow maybe, when we have seen this thing through.  And in the meantime, whatever happens, I don’t want you to give a thought to it.  The German doesn’t live who can get the better of me—­not after what you have said.”