"Shall I take an auto?"

"Take anything, only hurry."

"And you want _me_ at nine o'clock?"

Coquenil shook his head. "Not until to-morrow."

"But the news you were going to tell me?"

"There'll be bigger news soon. Oh, run across to the church and tell
Bonneton that he needn't come either."

"I knew it, I knew it," chuckled Papa Tignol, as he trotted off. "There's
something doing!"

[Illustration: "'I want you,' he said in a low voice."]

With this much arranged, Coquenil, after paying for his friend's absinthe,
strolled over to a cab stand near the statue of Henri IV and selected a
horse that could not possibly make more than four miles an hour. Behind
this deliberate animal he seated himself, and giving the driver his
address, he charged him gravely not to go too fast, and settled back
against the cushions to comfortable meditations. "There is no better way to
think out a tough problem," he used to insist, "than to take a very long
drive in a very slow cab."

It may have been that this horse was not slow enough, for forty minutes
later Coquenil's frown was still unrelaxed when they drew up at the Villa
Montmorency, really a collection of villas, some dozens of them, in a
private park near the Bois de Boulogne, each villa a garden within a
garden, and the whole surrounded by a great stone wall that shuts out
noises and intrusions. They entered by a massive iron gateway on the Rue
Poussin and moved slowly up the ascending Avenue des Tilleuls, past lawns
and trees and vine-covered walls, leaving behind the rush and glare of the
city and entering a peaceful region of flowers and verdure where Coquenil
lived.

The detective occupied a wing of the original Montmorency chateau, a
habitation of ten spacious rooms, more than enough for himself and his
mother and the faithful old servant, Melanie, who took care of them,
especially during these summer months, when Madame Coquenil was away at a
country place in the Vosges Mountains that her son had bought for her. Paul
Coquenil had never married, and his friends declared that, besides his
work, he loved only two things in the world--his mother and his dog.

It was a quarter to eight when M. Paul sat down in his spacious dining room
to a meal that was waiting when he arrived and that Melanie served with
solicitous care, remarking sadly that her master scarcely touched anything,
his eyes roving here and there among painted mountain scenes that covered
the four walls