"Strange," he muttered to himself, "strange if, after all, after years of meditation and inquiry, I should thus have lit upon the clew! Strange, strange!"
He struck, as thus he mused, upon a little bronze gong that stood by his side and ready to his hand, and a moment later the door was opened and a man of about his own age came into the room in answer to the summons; a man whose plain garb, made of the local Nîmes serge, and wig à trois marteaux, proclaimed almost with certainty that he was a clerk or secretary.
"Casalis," the Intendant said, he having put the seal beneath some papers ere the other entered, "there is in the library a book entitled, Devises et blasons de la Noblesse Française, is there not?"
"There is, your Excellency. Prepared a year ago by Monsieur le Comte----"
"Precisely. Fetch it, if you please."
The man retired, and, after being absent some few moments, came back, bearing in his hand a large, handsome volume bound in pale brown morocco, the back and sides covered with fine gold tooling and with Baville's crest stamped also on each side--a splendid book, if its contents corresponded with its exterior.
"Shall I find any particular entry for your Excellency?" the man asked, pausing with the volume in his hand.
"No, leave it. I may desire to look into it presently."
Left alone, however, Baville looked into it at once, pausing at the names under "B" to regard with some complacency his own crest and arms beautifully reproduced in colours on vellum.
Then he turned over a vast number of leaves in a mass, arriving at the letter "T," and re-turning back to "R," finding thereby the page which was headed "De Rochebazon." And emblazoned in the middle of the vellum in red, gold, and blue was the coat of arms of that great family; above it was the crest of the house, on a rock proper a hawk with wings elevated--the motto "Gare."