me to this neighborhood, and when I
reached Bordeaux I took the opportunity to run out to see you and Miss
Coburn."

The manager replied suitably, and the conversation became general. As
soon as he could with civility, Merriman rose to go. Mr. Coburn cried
out in protest, but the other insisted.

Mr. Coburn had become more cordial, and the two men strolled together
across the clearing. Merriman had had no opportunity of further private
conversation with Madeleine, but he pressed her hand and smiled at her
encouragingly on saying good-bye.

As the taxi bore him swiftly back towards Bordeaux, his mind was
occupied with the girl to the exclusion of all else. It was not so much
that he thought definitely about her, as that she seemed to fill all his
consciousness. He felt numb, and his whole being ached for her as with a
dull physical pain. But it was a pain that was mingled with exultation,
for if she had refused him, she had at least admitted that she loved
him. Incredible thought! He smiled ecstatically, then, the sense of loss
returning, once more gazed gloomily ahead into vacancy. As the evening
wore on his thoughts turned towards what she had said about the
syndicate. Her forged note theory had come to him as a complete
surprise, and he wondered whether she really had hit on the true
solution of the mystery. The conversation she had overheard undoubtedly
pointed in that direction. "Planting stuff" was, he believed, the
technical phrase for passing forged notes, and the reference to "tens,"
"twenties," and "fifties," tended in the same direction. Also "forming
connections to get rid of it" seemed to suggest the finding of agents
who would take a number of notes at a time, to be passed on by ones and
twos, no doubt for a consideration.

But there was the obvious difficulty that the theory did not account
for the operations as a whole. The elaborate mechanism of the pit-prop
industry was not needed to provide a means of carrying forged notes
from France to England. They could be secreted about the person of a
traveller crossing by any of the ordinary routes. Hundreds of notes
could be sewn into the lining of an overcoat, thousands carried in the
double bottom of a suitcase. Of course, so frequent a traveller would
require a plausible reason for his journeys, but that would present no
difficulty to men like those composing the syndicate. In any case, by
crossing in rotation by the dozen or so well-patronized routes be