and pacing up and
down the room, his face flushed, his eyes glowing.

"Beautiful!" he murmured from time to time. "Immense! What a case it
will make, Lester!" he cried, stopping before my chair and beaming
down upon me, as I finished the story. "Unique, too; that's the
beauty of it! As unique as this adorable Boule cabinet!"

"Then you see it, too?" I questioned, a little disappointed that my
theory should seem so evident.

"See it?" and he dropped into his chair again. "A man would be blind
not to see it. But all the same, Lester, I give you credit for
putting the facts together. So many of us--Grady, for instance!
--aren't able to do that, or to see which facts are essential and
which are negligible. Now the fact that Vantine had accidentally come
into possession of a Boule cabinet would probably seem negligible to
Grady, whereas it is the one big essential fact in this whole case.
And it was you who saw it."

"You saw it, too," I pointed out, "as soon as I mentioned it."

"Yes; but you mentioned it in a way which made its importance
manifest. I couldn't help seeing it. And I believe that we have both
arrived at practically the same conclusions. Here they are," and he
checked them off on his fingers. "The cabinet contains a secret
drawer. This is inevitable, if it really belonged to Madame de
Montespan. Any cabinet made for her would be certain to have a secret
drawer--she would require it, just as she would require lace on her
underwear or jewelled buttons on her gloves. That drawer, since it
was, perhaps, to contain such priceless documents as the love letters
of a king--even more so, if the love letters were from another man!
--must be adequately guarded, and therefore a mechanism was devised to
stab the person attempting to open it and to inject into the wound a
poison so powerful as to cause instant death. Am I right so far?"

"Wonderfully right," I nodded. "I had not put it so clearly, even to
myself. Go ahead."

"We come to the conclusion, then," continued Godfrey, "that the
business of this unknown Frenchman with Vantine in some way concerned
this cabinet."

"Vantine himself thought so," I broke in. "He told me afterwards that
it was because he thought so he consented to see him."

"Good! That would seem to indicate that we are on the right track.
The Frenchman's business, then, had something to do with this
cabinet, and with this secret drawer. Left to himself, he discovered
the cabinet in the ro