So the thing went round the room until it came to Loo Barebone.
“I have seen it before,” he said. “I think I remember seeing it long ago—when I was a little child.”
And he handed it to the old Vicomte de Castel Aunet, whose shaking fingers closed round it in a breathless silence. He carried it to the table, and some one brought candles. The Viconite was very old. He had learnt clock-making, they said, in prison during the Terror.
“Il n’y a moyen,” he whispered to himself. “I must break it.”
With one effort he prised up the cover, but the hinge snapped, and the lid rolled across the table into Barebone’s hand.
“Ah!” he cried, in that breathless silence, “now I remember it. I remember the red silk lining of the cover, and in the other side there is the portrait of a lady with—”
The Vicomte paused, with his palm covering the other half of the locket and looked across at Loo. And the eyes of all Royalist France were fixed on the same face.
“Silence!” whispered Dormer Colville in English, crushing Barebone’s foot under the table.