ey say."

"Well, she evidently knows how to win money at the tables, mother," said
the girl, lifting her clear blue eyes to those of her lover.

"Yes. But I wonder what the scandal is all about?" said the widow of the
great engineer.

"Oh! don't trouble to inquire Lady Ranscomb," Hugh hastened to remark.
"One hears scandal on every hand in Monte Carlo."

"Yes. I suppose so," replied the elder woman, and then the subject was
dropped.

So the ugly affair was being rumoured. It caused Hugh a good deal of
apprehension, for he feared that his name would be associated with that
of the mysterious Mademoiselle. Evidently one or other of the servants
at the Villa Amette had been indiscreet.

At that moment, in his private room at the bureau of police down
in Monaco, Superintendent Ogier was carefully perusing a dossier of
official papers which had been brought to him by the archivist.

Between his thin lips was a long, thin, Swiss cigar--his favorite
smoke--and with his gold-rimmed pince-nez poised upon his aquiline
nose he was reading a document which would certainly have been of
considerable interest to Hugh Henfrey and his friend Walter Brock could
they have seen it.

Upon the pale yellow paper were many lines of typewriting in French--a
carbon copy evidently.

It was headed: "Republique Francaise. Department of Herault. Prefecture
of Police. Bureau of the Director of Police. Reference Number 20197.B.,"
and was dated nearly a year before.

It commenced:

"Copy of an 'information' in the archives of the Prefecture of the
Department of Herault concerning the woman Marie Mignot, or Leullier,
now passing under the name of Yvonne Ferad and living at the Villa
Amette at Monte Carlo.

"The woman in question was born in 1884 at Number 45 Rue des Etuves,
in Montpellier, and was the daughter of one Doctor Rigaud, a noted
toxicologist of the Faculty of Medicine, and curator of the University
Library. At the age of seventeen, after her father's death, she became
a school teacher at a small school in the Rue Morceau, and at nineteen
married Charles Leullier, a good-looking young scoundrel who posed
as being well off, but who was afterwards proved to be an expert
international thief, a member of a gang of dangerous thieves who
committed robberies in the European express trains.

"This fact was unknown to the girl, therefore at first all went
smoothly, until the wife discovered the truth and left him. She then
joined the