agne. But the name will be on the Commissary's list. It is, as I
remember, a sort of Flemish.'

He hobbled off and returned in five minutes.

'Bommaerts,' he said, 'Jacques Bommaerts. A young man with no wife but
with money--Dieu de Dieu, what oceans of it!'

That clerk got twenty-five francs, and he was cheap at the price. I
went back to my division with a sense of awe on me. It was a marvellous
fate that had brought me by odd routes to this out-of-the-way corner.
First, the accident of Hamilton's seeing Gresson; then the night in the
Clearing Station; last the mishap of Archie's plane getting lost in the
fog. I had three grounds of suspicion--Gresson's sudden illness, the
Canadian's ghost, and that horrid old woman in the dusk. And now I had
one tremendous fact. The place was leased by a man called Bommaerts,
and that was one of the two names I had heard whispered in that
far-away cleft in the Coolin by the stranger from the sea.

A sensible man would have gone off to the contre-espionage people and
told them his story. I couldn't do this; I felt that it was my own
private find and I was going to do the prospecting myself. Every moment
of leisure I had I was puzzling over the thing. I rode round by the
Chateau one frosty morning and examined all the entrances. The main one
was the grand avenue with the locked gates. That led straight to the
front of the house where the terrace was--or you might call it the
back, for the main door was on the other side. Anyhow the drive came up
to the edge of the terrace and then split into two, one branch going to
the stables by way of the outbuildings where I had seen the old woman,
the other circling round the house, skirting the moat, and joining the
back road just before the bridge. If I had gone to the right instead of
the left that first evening with Archie, I should have circumnavigated
the place without any trouble.

Seen in the fresh morning light the house looked commonplace enough.
Part of it was as old as Noah, but most was newish and jerry-built, the
kind of flat-chested, thin French Chateau, all front and no depth, and
full of draughts and smoky chimneys. I might have gone in and ransacked
the place, but I knew I should find nothing. It was borne in on me that
it was only when evening fell that that house was interesting and that
I must come, like Nicodemus, by night. Besides I had a private account
to settle with my conscience. I had funked the place in the foggy
t