So we went back, and seated with Vera and Judith, I had a long chat with the latter, about many things. She told me much that interested me. Paulton and the Baronne ran this establishment, as I had guessed, and often made it their headquarters. They had several assumed names. They had run similar secret gaming-houses in Paris, Ostend, Aix and elsewhere. In this particular house they lived in a big, well-furnished flat overlooking the harbour of Monaco. Vera and Violet had each a bedroom, and shared a sitting-room. Since they had met for the first time, some weeks previously, they had become great friends--in fact almost inseparable. Both had been staying at the Chateau d'Uzerche when the fire had broken out, and she, Judith, had been there too. It had been Vera's voice we had heard calling for help before we suspected the alarming truth. She had been overcome by smoke in her own room--it was just before that she had called for help--and almost stifled. No lives had been lost. There had been only five servants at D'Uzerche that night, and they had all escaped. The Baronne had, it seemed, escaped by turning sharp to the right into a lumber-room, almost directly she had rushed out of the room. From the lumber-room she had scrambled through a skylight on to the roof, entered another skylight immediately above a rusty iron fire staircase, the existence of which everybody else had forgotten, and so made her way out of the building in safety. I inquired about the man and woman struggling in the dark. She smiled when I referred to this, and, pulling up her short sleeve--it reached barely to her elbow--displayed several horizontal streaks of a deep purple which looked like bruises. "I was that woman," exclaimed Judith quietly. "The man was Dago, and these are the marks his fingers left upon me when he gripped me and fought with me. Are you surprised I have to-night so readily betrayed his hiding-place?" "Not so very readily," I said, thinking of the sum of which she had mulcted me before she would speak at all. Guessing my thoughts, she laughed. "Still, m'sieur," she said, "you will admit that you have received full value for your money, _n'est-ce-pas_?"