This explanation was hardly realized before it was confirmed.
I came out abruptly onto a slope of bracken, and before me at a few paces on the path were Madame Barras and two men; one at some distance in advance of her, disappearing at the moment behind a spur of the slope that hid us from the sea, and I got no conception of him; but the creature at her heels was a huge foreign beast of a man, in the dress of a common sailor.
What happened was over in a moment.
I was nearly on the man when I turned out of the wood, and with a shout to Madame Barras I struck at him with the heavy walking-stick. But the creature was not to be taken unaware; he darted to one side, wrenched the stick out of my hand, and dashed its heavy-weighted head into my face. I went down in the bracken, but I carried with me into unconsciousness a vision of Madame Barras that no shadow of the lengthening years can blur.
She had swung round sharply at the attack behind her, and she stood bare-haired and bare-shouldered, knee-deep in the golden bracken, with the glory of the moon on her; her arms hanging, her lips parted, her great eyes wide with terror—as lovely in her desperate extremity as a dream, as, a painted picture. I don't know how long I was down there, but when I finally got up, and, following along the path behind the spur of rock, came out onto the open sea, I found Sir Henry Marquis. He was standing with his hands in the pockets of his loose tweed coat, and he was cursing softly:
“The ferry and the mainland are patroled... I didn't think of their having an ocean-going yacht....”
A gleam of light was disappearing into the open sea.
He put his hand into his pocket and took out the scraps of torn paper.
“These notes,” he said, “like the ones which you hold in your bank-vault, were never issued by the Bank of England.”
I stammered some incoherent sentence; and the great chief of the Criminal Investigation Department of Scotland Yard turned toward me.