She protested warmly:
"And you too, Raoul! You too! We fought together! Your grandfather was a direct descendant of the Marquis! He possessed the token of the medal!"
"That medal was of no value."
"How do you know? You've never had it in your hands."
"I have."
"Impossible. There was nothing in the disc I fished up under your eyes. It was simply a bait to catch d'Estreicher. Then?"
"When my grandfather came back from his journey to Roche-Périac, where you met him with Juliet Assire, one day I found him weeping in the orchard. He was looking at a gold medal, which he let me take from him and look at. On it were all the indications you have described. But the two faces were canceled by a cross, which manifestly, as I told you, deprived it of all value."
Dorothy appeared greatly surprised by this revelation, and she replied in an absent-minded tone:
"Oh! ... really?... You saw?..."
She went to one of the windows and stood there for some minutes, her forehead resting against a pane. The last veils which obscured the adventure were withdrawn. Really there had been two gold medals. One, which was invalid and belonged to Jean d'Argonne, had been stolen by d'Estreicher, recovered by Raoul's father, and sent to the old Baron. The other, the valid one was the one which belonged to the old Baron, who, out of prudence or greed, had never spoken of it to his son or grandson. In his madness, and dispossessed in his turn of the token, which he had hidden in his dog's collar, he had gone to win the treasure with the other medal, which he had intrusted to Juliet Assire, and which d'Estreicher had been unable to find.