“Yes, yes; no doubt you’re right. But I attached so little importance to that inscription that I can’t remember exactly what it was.... It was something to do with a stone and a queen.”
“You must recall it, Clarice; you really must,” he begged, for a sudden fresh overclouding of Josephine’s face made him again anxious.
Slowly, her brow knitted in the effort to remember, correcting herself and contradicting herself, the young girl succeeded in saying:
“Here it is—I remember—this is exactly the sentence that I made out ... five Latin words ... in this order:
Ad lapidem currebat olim regina.”
She had hardly got the last syllable out when Josephine bent sharply towards her and cried furiously: “It’s a lie! That formula—we’ve known it for ages! Beaumagnan can bear witness to that. We knew it, didn’t we, Beaumagnan? She’s lying, Ralph! She’s lying! The Cardinal mentions those five words in his memorandum; and he considered them of so little importance and so firmly refused to attach any meaning to them that I did not even tell you about them!... In days gone by the queen ran to the stone. But where is it, that stone? And who was the queen who ran to it? We’ve been trying to find out for the last twenty years. No, no! There’s something else!”
Once again that terrible rage filled her, that rage which did not manifest itself in a raised voice of incoherent words but in an agitation altogether interior, which one divined from certain symptoms and above all from the unusual and abnormal cruelty of her words.
Bending over the young girl she cried: “You lie!... You lie!... There is one word which sums up the meaning of those five.... What is it?... There’s a key-word.... A single key-word.... What is it?”
Terrorized, Clarice lost the power of utterance.
“Think, Clarice,” Ralph implored her. “Try to remember.... Besides those five words, did you not see something else?”