“Fifteen centuries since that day! Fifteen centuries during which these masterpieces in stone and marble have been worn away. Fifteen centuries which might have been followed by a hundred more in which the destruction of these memorials of a glorious past would have been completed. If your grandfather, exploring the abandoned estate of his friend Talencay, had not by chance discovered the machinery of the flood-gates. Forthwith the two friends searched and groped and studied and cudgelled their brains. They repaired the machinery. They set machinery of the old massive wooden gates, which in days gone by kept the little lake at the level which submerged the tops of the buildings, working again. They repaired the machinery which worked the sluices. “That’s the whole story, Aurelie, and this is the city you visited when you were six years old. Your grandfather died; the Marquess never left his estate at Juvains again; he consecrated himself body and soul to the recovery of the invisible city. With the help of two of his shepherds he excavated, dug, cleaned, consolidated, and restored the work of the past; and that is the gift he offers you, a wonderful gift, which not only brings you incalculable wealth from the exploitation of a spring more precious than all those of Royat and Vichy, but also gives you a collection of works of art and monuments such as exists nowhere else.” Ralph’s enthusiasm knew no bounds. It was sustained for more than an hour during which he expressed all the exaltation with which this affair of the drowned city filled him. Hand in hand they watched the rising water and the sinking columns and statues. Aurelie, however, kept silent. At last, astonished to feel that they were no longer enjoying a complete communion of thought, he asked her the reason of it. She did not answer at once; but presently she said: “You don’t know yet what has become of the Marquess of Talencay, do you?” “No,” said Ralph, not wishing to spoil the girl’s happiness. “I expect that he remained at home, in the village, out of sorts perhaps—always supposing that he has not forgotten the appointment.” It was a poor excuse; and Aurelie did not appear satisfied by it. He guessed that, after all the emotion she had felt and all the anguish from which he had freed her, she was thinking of the things which still remained obscure and that she was still troubled by not understanding them. “Let’s be going,” she said. They climbed up to the ruined hut where the two crooks had encamped the night before. Ralph proposed to go from it to the high wall through which the shepherds had driven their flocks. As they came round a rock near it she drew Ralph’s attention to a good-sized bundle. A canvas sack resting on the edge of the cliff. “It looks as if it moved,” she said. Ralph glanced at it, told her to stay where she was, and ran to it. An idea had suddenly struck him.