Billy hesitated. “The consul gave me a good fatherly talk, and he had a pretty gruesome suggestion about that ball. He says Fontainebleau--that’s where the countess lives, you know--is on the edge of a great forest, and that you could get a stranger out there and drive him off somewhere and rob him without half trying.” He turned to Babbie. “Do you remember our guying him about your money and your ring? Well, I think that was undoubtedly his scheme. But when you hung back and he knew that you had probably heard Miss Wales’s story, why then he cooked up a substitute. My checks wouldn’t have been safe plunder, so there was no use in holding me up.”