about knowing who that portrait was, and he asked me not to say anything about it, especially to Louis. Everything else I've worked out for myself, and it may be all wrong; but somehow I don't think it is."

The two listeners looked crestfallen. For some time past they had come to believe that the Imp was wholly and entirely in Monsieur's confidence. It was a shock to learn the truth. Carol immediately intimated as much to the assembled company.

"You're a pack of sillies," exclaimed the Imp scornfully, "to imagine such a thing, anyway! Why, this thing is of--of immense importance to--well, I was almost going to say to the whole world. Do you suppose for one moment that a youngster would be let into such an important secret?"

"What are you saying? 'To the whole world'?" cried Carol. "Are you going crazy, or do you think you are taking us in again with some of your nonsense?"

"I'm not talking nonsense, and I'll prove it. Do you know what I discovered by reading a little more than you did at the library, and also from an old book that Miss Hastings lent me, because I told her I was interested in the subject? Well, I found out that, although most people think it's a settled fact that that poor little dauphin died in prison, still there are a lot of legends that he really escaped, that he was helped to escape by some of the Royalists, and that the little boy who died there wasn't the dauphin at all!"

The Imp stopped to let this startling news sink into the minds of her hearers.

"But--but--" stammered Sue, "if he escaped, what became of him?"

"That's something that never was known," answered the Imp. "After the downfall of Napoleon and the restoration of the Bourbons in France, there were a lot of pretenders who said they were the escaped dauphin and claimed the throne. But they never could prove it, so no one paid much attention to them. Only you see there must have been some truth in it,--his escape, I mean,--or no one would have thought of such a thing."

"But I don't see, anyway, what all that has to do with this affair," remarked Carol.

"Don't you?" replied the Imp coldly. "Then you're more stupid than I gave you credit for being."

Carol quite wilted under this rebuke, but Sue, who had been doing some rapid thinking, cried:

"Mercy! It 

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