Something in the stolid way he did so caused Flambeau's fierce black
eyes to ramble over his companion afresh. "What's the matter with you?"
Flambeau demanded. "Dubosc's all right in that way. You don't doubt
him?"

"My friend," said the small priest, laying down his knife and fork in a
kind of cold despair, "I doubt everything. Everything, I mean, that has
happened today. I doubt the whole story, though it has been acted before
my face. I doubt every sight that my eyes have seen since morning. There
is something in this business quite different from the ordinary police
mystery where one man is more or less lying and the other man more or
less telling the truth. Here both men.... Well! I've told you the only
theory I can think of that could satisfy anybody. It doesn't satisfy
me."

"Nor me either," replied Flambeau frowning, while the other went on
eating fish with an air of entire resignation. "If all you can suggest
is that notion of a message conveyed by contraries, I call it uncommonly
clever, but...well, what would you call it?"

"I should call it thin," said the priest promptly. "I should call it
uncommonly thin. But that's the queer thing about the whole business.
The lie is like a schoolboy's. There are only three versions, Dubosc's
and Hirsch's and that fancy of mine. Either that note was written by
a French officer to ruin a French official; or it was written by the
French official to help German officers; or it was written by the French
official to mislead German officers. Very well. You'd expect a secret
paper passing between such people, officials or officers, to look
quite different from that. You'd expect, probably a cipher, certainly
abbreviations; most certainly scientific and strictly professional
terms. But this thing's elaborately simple, like a penny dreadful: 'In
the purple grotto you will find the golden casket.' It looks as if... as
if it were meant to be seen through at once."

Almost before they could take it in a short figure in French uniform
had walked up to their table like the wind, and sat down with a sort of
thump.

"I have extraordinary news," said the Duc de Valognes. "I have just come
from this Colonel of ours. He is packing up to leave the country, and he
asks us to make his excuses sur le terrain."

"What?" cried Flambeau, with an incredulity quite
frightful--"apologize?"

"Yes," said the Duke gruffly; "then and there--before everybody--when
the swords are drawn. And you