It was, indeed, the port of Nantes. The captain had not chosen to risk the voyage around the stormy coast of Brittany with his depleted coal supply, and had taken the old _Toulouse_ to the nearest port. “Here’s where Melody scores!” Brainard muttered, when he realized the significance of the news. “Now for a quick exit to Paris, before the telegraph gets in its deadly work and notifies the civilized world where we are!” XVII Three hours later the passengers of the _Toulouse_ were aboard a special train for Paris, and in a first-class compartment Brainard was seated, facing his valise, and looking out upon the pleasant landscape of the Loire valley, a contented expression on his brown young face. He had already formulated to himself the exact plot of his movements from the moment he reached Paris. From the pleasant Frenchwoman who had been his neighbor at the ship’s table he had learned the address of a little hotel in the Bourse quarter, where she assured him that Americans rarely appeared. It was not far from the large bank in which he intended to deposit Melody’s burdensome fortune until he could make arrangements for disposing of it. It did not take him long, therefore, to install himself at the little Hôtel des Voyageurs et Brésil, and to rid himself of his troublesome loot. Then he wrote a letter to Schneider Brothers, of Berlin, who, he had learned at the Crédit Lyonnais, were a well-known firm of bankers with an agency in New York. He wrote the Messrs. Schneider that in obedience to the instructions of the late Mr. Herbert Krutzmacht, of San Francisco, he wished to consult with them in regard to the disposal of some securities that he had in his possession. He would remain for the present in Paris, and he begged to suggest that the bankers should send a responsible agent to meet him at some place—preferably The Hague, whither he was going the following week. He had selected The Hague as a safe middle ground, after consulting the map of Europe in his guidebook. “That will draw their fire,” he thought complacently. “We shall see on which side of the game they are!” Having mailed the letter, he strolled out to the boulevards to enjoy his first whiff of Paris. This was the city that he had walked in his dreams! He had never hoped to see it; but now he was strolling along the Boulevard des Italiens, and there before his eyes lay the great Place de l’Opéra, with its maze of automobiles, ’buses, and pedestrians. And there—Brainard stopped in the middle of the crowded _place_, wrapped in wonder, staring at the gilded figures on the façade of the Opéra, until an excitable official with a white baton poured a stream of voluble expostulation into his ear, and he dodged from under an omnibus just in time to fall into the path of a motor, causing general execration.