d not have
been intentional. Why had--he began to tear suddenly at the glove's
little finger, and in another second, kneeling on the car's step, his
shoulders inside, he was holding a ring close under the little electric
bulb.

It was a gold seal ring, a small, dainty thing that bore a crest:
a bell, surmounted by a bishop's mitre--the bell, quaint in design,
harking the imagination back to some old-time belfry tower. And
underneath, in the scroll--a motto. It was a full minute before Jimmie
Dale could decipher it, for the lettering was minute and the words, of
course, reversed. It was in French: SONNEZ LE TOCSIN.

He straightened up, the glove and ring in his hand, a puzzled expression
on his face. It was strange! Had she, after all, dropped the glove
there intentionally; had she at last let down the barriers just a little
between them, and given him this little intimate sign that she--

And then Jimmie Dale laughed abruptly, self-mockingly. He was only
trying to deceive himself, to argue himself into believing what, with
heart and soul, he wanted to believe. It was not like her--and neither
was it so! His eyes had fixed on the seat beside the wheel. He had not
used the lap rug all that day, he couldn't use a rug and drive, he had
left it folded and hanging on the rack in the tonneau--it was now neatly
folded and reposing on the front seat!

"Yes," said Jimmie Dale, a sort of self-pity in his tones, "I might have
known."

He lifted the rug. Beneath it on the leather seat lay a white envelope.
Her letter! The letter that never came save with the plan of some grim,
desperate work outlined ahead--the call to arms for the Gray Seal.
SONNEZ LE TOCSIN! Ring the Tocsin! Sound the alarm! The Tocsin!
The words were running through his brain. A strange motto on that
crest--that seemed so strangely apt! The Tocsin! Never once in all the
times that he had heard from her, never once in the years that had gone
since that initial letter of hers had struck its first warning note,
had any communication from her been but to sound again a new alarm--the
Toscin! The Tocsin--the word seemed to visualise her, to give her a
concrete form and being, to breathe her very personality.

"The Tocsin!"--Jimmie Dale whispered the word softly, a little
wistfully. "Yes; I shall call you that--the Tocsin!"

He folded the glove very carefully, placed it with the ring in his
pocketbook, picked up the letter--and, with a sharp exclamation, turned