For now I will tell you: I wanted money for a purpose, and I thought I had seen the way to procure it. I was always one that lived strong and wastefully, burning the candle of toil or pleasure at both ends with a selfsame zest. The silent white tents of the mountains or the roaring booths of the fair--they could possess for me an equal madness of attraction. For all my activity I had seldom anything but empty pockets; and so once it came in upon me how easeful a new sensation it would be to marry, and take perhaps an auberge, and rest and ripen on the rich vintage of my experience. Only, where to find the capital? Yes, that was it--that might always have been the difficulty, had I not once become possessed of a secret which it was surely within a certain person’s interest to pay me not to reveal. That secret, then, was my potential. What was it? What was this tremendous secret? It is uttered in a breath. I knew, I had known from the first, that Milord had never run away, but that he had been murdered, and his body hidden in a subterranean chamber, by the man who professed to be his friend and admonitor. I will explain. High above Cormayeur, among the waste and desolation of the hills, there pours itself down a torrent which is called Lapluietonnante--the Rain of Thunder. Once and more, this torrent, entering through rocky ravines, plunges like a mad and foaming horse, until at length, too blind with terror to note where it is going, it leaps from a precipice, and crashes in a ruin of watery splinters on the rocks a score of yards below. Now, at the very point where the water springs from the gorge, there is a certain fissure in the wall of rock, not easily observable amongst others, but which, having once discovered and entered, one will find leads down by a fantastic passage into a chamber or grotto situated right behind the fall and opening on to it. Here was a secret of knowledge, I thought, my own exclusive property, until Milord came to disabuse my mind. He did not confess his discovery to me; but I gathered, from what he let fall, that his daring spirit had penetrated to the arcanum which heretofore had been my solitary possession. “I could show you, Geoletti,” said he once, “a cavern in the water that would be worth a little fortune to you in tips, if you knew it. But I’m going to keep it to myself till I go; and then perhaps I’ll let out.” I smiled to him, confessing nothing; but from that moment I was always on the watch to see if my suspicion were correct. There was a second fissure immediately above the other, but shallow, and with a projection of rock within it apt for cover; and there, when I knew Milord to be abroad in the neighbourhood, I would often hide myself, and spy to see him come. And once at last he came, and the Gouverneur with him.