"Yes," said Dorothy.
She had succeeded! The insoluble problem, with which so many minds had wrestled so many times and at such length, for ages—she had solved it!
"But when? At what moment?" cried George Errington. "You never left us!"
"Oh, it goes a long way further back than that. It goes back to my visit to the Château de Roborey."
"Eh, what? What's that you say?" cried the astounded Count de Chagny.
"From the first minute I knew at any rate the nature of the hiding-place in which the treasure was shut up."
"But how?"
"From the motto."
"From the motto?"
"But it's so plain! So plain that I've never understood the blindness of those who have searched for the treasure, and that I went so far as to declare the man who, when concealing a treasure, gave so much information about it, ingenuous in the extreme. But he was right, was the Marquis de Beaugreval. He could engrave it all over the place, on the clock of his château, on the wax of his seals, since to his descendants his motto meant nothing at all."