e? Do you believe
that she is actually Dumont's daughter, and that the shiners have really
been stolen?"

"The former question is more difficult to answer than the latter. A wire
to London will clear up the truth. In all probability the police are
keeping the affair out of the papers. The girl went over to London to
try and find her father, and met you, she says."

"She met me, certainly. But the little fool told me nothing about her
father's disappearance or the missing jewels."

"Because the Paris police had warned her not to, in all probability."

"Well----" he gasped. "If that story is really true, it is the grandest
slice of luck we've ever had, Ewart," he declared.

"How? What do you mean?"

"What I say," was his brief answer. "I shall go back to London after
breakfast. You'll remain here, look after the girl and Madame Vernet. I
don't envy you the latter. She's got yellow teeth, and is ugly enough to
break a mirror," he laughed.

"But why go to London?" I queried.

"For reasons best known to myself, Ewart," he snapped; for he never
approved of inquisitiveness when forming any plans.

Then for a long time he was silent, his resourceful brain active,
plunged in thought.

"Well!" he exclaimed, "this is about the queerest affair that I've ever
had on hand. I came out here to-day from London on one big thing, and in
an hour or two I'm going back on another!"

Presently, just as we were ascending the hill from La Condamine, and
within a few hundred yards of the big Hotel de Paris garage, which was
our destination, he turned to me and said--

"Look here, Ewart! we've got a big thing on here--bigger than either of
us imagine. I wonder what the fellows will think when they hear of it?
Now all you have to do is to be pleasant to the little girl--make her
believe that you're a bit gone on her, if you like."

"But she's over head and ears in love with you," I observed.

"Love be hanged!" he laughed carelessly. "We're out for money, my dear
Ewart--and we'll have a lot of it out of this, never fear!"

A moment later I swung into the great garage, where hundreds of cars
were standing--that garage with the female directress which every
motorist knows so well.

And I stopped the engines, and literally fell out, utterly done up and
exhausted after that mad drive from the Thames to the Mediterranean.

The circumstances seemed even more complicated and mysterious than I had
imagined them to be.

But the main q