"But there was also a photograph, the one you know of, and a bundle of letters from your agents in France. I didn't want to have those proofs found on me if I was discovered."
"Rosenthal was to have brought them to me himself. Unfortunately, he made a blunder."
Karl merely shrugged his shoulders and said:
"Yes, he never knew how to look after himself," added the major, completing the funeral oration. "Take his pocketbook from him, Karl. He used to carry it in an inside pocket of his woolen waistcoat."
"Then he put it somewhere else. Look in the other pockets."
"What! This is beyond me! Rosenthal never parted with his pocketbook. He used to keep it to sleep with; he would have kept it to die with."
"Some one must have been here recently and taken the pocketbook."
The spy rose to his feet, was silent for a moment and then, going up to the major, said in a deliberate voice:
"Not Frenchmen, _Excellenz_, but a Frenchman."
"_Excellenz_, Delroze started on a reconnaissance not long ago with his brother-in-law, Bernard d'Andeville. I could not get to know in which direction, but I know now. He came this way. He must have explored the ruins of the lighthouse and, seeing some dead lying about, turned out their pockets."
"That's a bad business," growled the major. "Are you sure?"
"Certain. He must have been here an hour ago at most. Perhaps," added Karl, with a laugh, "perhaps he's here still, hiding in some hole. . . ."
Both of them cast a look around them, but mechanically; and the movement denoted no serious fear on their part. Then the major continued, pensively:
"After all, that bundle of letters received by our agents, letters without names or addresses to them, doesn't matter so much. But the photograph is more important."
"I should think so, _Excellenz_! Why, here's a photograph taken in 1902; and we've been looking for it, therefore, for the last twelve years. I manage, after untold efforts, to discover it among the papers which Comte Stéphane d'Andeville left behind at the outbreak of war. And this photograph, which you wanted to take back from the Comte d'Andeville, to whom you had been careless enough to give it, is now in the hands of Paul Delroze, M. d'Andeville's son-in-law, Élisabeth d'Andeville's husband and your mortal enemy!"
