?"

"Not this cigarette, at any rate," he replied. "Madame Barras has
already smoked it.... I can, perhaps, find you the burnt match."

He got the electric-flash out of his pocket, and stooped over.
Immediately he made an exclamation of surprise.

I leaned down beside him.

There was a little heap of charred paper on the brown bed of
pine-needles. Marquis was about to take up this charred paper when his
eye caught something thrust in between the two stones. It was a handful
of torn bits of paper.

Marquis got them out and laid them on the top of the flat stones under
his light.

"Ah," he said, "Madame Barras, while she smoked, got rid of some money."

"The package of gold certificates!" I cried. "She has burned them?"

"No," he replied, "Madame Barras has favored your Treasury in her
destructive process. These are five-pound notes, of the Bank of
England."

I was astonished and I expressed it.

"But why should Madame Barras destroy notes of the Bank of England?"

"I imagine," he answered, "that they were some which she had, by chance,
failed to give you for exchange."

"But why should she destroy them?" I went on.

"I conclude," he drawled, "that she was not wholly certain that she
would escape."

"Escape!" I cried. "You have been assuring me all along that Madame
Barras is making no effort to escape."

"Oh, no," he replied, "she is making every effort."

I was annoyed and puzzled.

"What is it," I said, "precisely, that Madame Barras did here; can you
tell me in plain words?"

"Surely," he replied, "she sat here while something was decided, and
while she sat here she smoked the cigarette, and while she smoked the
cigarette, she destroyed the money. But," he added, "before she had
quite finished, a decision was made and she hastily thrust the remaining
bits of the torn notes into the crevice between these stones."

"What decision?" I said.

Marquis gathered up the bits of torn paper and put them into his pocket
with the switched-off flash.

"I wish I knew that," he said.

"Knew what?"

"Which path they have taken," he replied; "there seem to be two
branching from this point, but they pass over a bed of pine-needles and
that retains no impression.... Where do these paths lead?"

I did not know that any paths came into the road at this point. But the
island is veined over with old paths. The lead of paths here, however,
was fairly evident.

"They must come out somewhere on the sea," I sai