“Look. I’ve had this on me for weeks. From the beginning of our search I looked up in an atlas the exact position of the seven abbeys, of which I have written the names on this card. Here they are, all seven of them, in the different positions in which they stand in regard to one another. Therefore all I had to do just now, as soon as I knew the word, was to join the seven points by lines to reach this unexpected conclusion, Josephine, this marvellous, colossal, and yet very natural conclusion that the figure so formed exactly represents the Great Bear. Do you grasp this really astonishing truth? The seven abbeys of the Caux country, the seven primordial abbeys into which flowed the riches of Christian France, were placed in the same positions as the seven principal stars in the Great Bear. There is no mistake about this. You have only to take an atlas and join them by lines. It is the cabalistic design of the Great Bear. “After that the truth at once became clear. At the very spot at which ALCOR is found in the Heavenly figure the block of stone will inevitably be found a little to the right below the abbey which corresponds to that star, that is to say a little to the right below the abbey of Jumièges, formerly the most powerful and richest of the abbeys of Normandy. It’s a mathematical certainty. The block of stone is there and nowhere else. Thereupon two facts stand out uncommonly clear, in fact they stare you in the face: firstly that a little to the southeast of Jumièges, scarcely a league away from it, there is, at the hamlet of Mesnil-sous-Jumièges, quite close to the Seine, the ruins of the Manor of Agnes Sorel, the mistress of King Charles VII; secondly that the abbey communicated with that manor by a subterranean passage of which you can still see the entrance. The conclusion is that the legendary block of stone is near the Manor of Agnes Sorel, on the bank of the Seine, and the inscription doubtless means that the mistress of the King, his Queen of Love, ran towards this block of stone, of the precious contents of which she was ignorant, and sat down on it to watch the royal barque glide down the old river of Normandy. “_Ad lapidem currebat olim regina._” A common, deep silence united Ralph and Josephine. The veil was raised. The light of day swept away the darkness. Between them it appeared that all hatred had ceased. There was a truce to the implacable conflicts which divided them and nothing remained but an immense astonishment at having so penetrated the forbidden regions of the mysterious past that time and space defended against human curiosity. Sitting near Josephine, his eyes fixed on the picture which he had drawn, Ralph continued in a low voice with a restrained exaltation: