catching up a lost scent; then he bent over,
brought his nose close to the level of the bare and dirty boards,
sniffed again, blew aside the dust, and exposed to view a tiny grease
spot not bigger than a child's thumbnail.

"_Huile Violette!_" he said, with a sound as of satisfied laughter in
his voice. "No wonder the scent of violets lingered. Look! here is
another spot--and here another," he added, blowing the dust away and
creeping on all fours in the direction the perfumed trail led. "Oh, I
know this stuff well, my friend," he went on. "For many, many years its
manufacture was a secret known only to the Spanish monks who carried it
with them to South America and subsequently established in that part of
the country now known as Argentina a monastery celebrated all over the
world as the only source from which this essential oil could be
procured."

"Argentina?" repeated Narkom agitatedly. "My dear chap, have you
forgotten that it was in Argentina Lord St. Ulmer spent those many years
of his self-imposed exile? If then, the stuff is only to be procured
there----"

"Gently, gently--you rush at top speed, Mr. Narkom. I said '_was_,'
recollect. It is still the chief point of its manufacture, but since
those days when the Spanish monks carried it there others have learned
the secret of it, notably the Turks who now manufacture an attar of
violets just as they have for years manufactured an attar of roses. It
is enormously expensive; for the veriest drop of it is sufficient, with
the necessary addition of alcohol, to manufacture half a pint of the
perfume known to commerce as 'Extract of Violet.' At one time it was a
favourite trick of very great ladies to wear on a bracelet a tiny golden
capsule containing two or three drops of it and supplied with a minute
jewelled stopper attached to a slender golden chain, which stopper they
occasionally removed for a moment or two that the aroma of the contents
might diffuse itself about them. I knew one woman--and one only--who
possessed such a bracelet. You, too, have heard of her. Whatever her
real name may be, she is simply known to those with whom she associates
as 'Margot.'"

"Scotland! The queen of the Apaches?"

"Yes."

"You are sure of that?"

"I ought to be. I, myself, stole the bracelet from the collection of the
Comte de Champdoce and presented it to her. I remember that the stopper
to the capsule was carved from a single emerald that, owing to its
age--it was sa