s shoulders: "That screen looked as if it had
stood there since the beginning of the summer," he said.

"The first thing, when you're dealing with Lupin, is to distrust
appearances," said Guerchard.

"Lupin!" cried M. Formery hotly. Then he bit his lip and was silent.

He walked to the side of the couch and looked down on the sleeping
Victoire, frowning: "This upsets everything," he said. "With these new
conditions, I've got to begin all over again, to find a new explanation
of the affair. For the moment--for the moment, I'm thrown completely
off the track. And you, Guerchard?"

"Oh, well," said Guerchard, "I have an idea or two about the matter
still."

"Do you really mean to say that it hasn't thrown you off the track
too?" said M. Formery, with a touch of incredulity in his tone.

"Well, no--not exactly," said Guerchard. "I wasn't on that track, you
see."

"No, of course not--of course not. You were on the track of Lupin,"
said M. Formery; and his contemptuous smile was tinged with malice.

The Duke looked from one to the other of them with curious, searching
eyes: "I find all this so interesting," he said.

"We do not take much notice of these checks; they do not depress us for
a moment," said M. Formery, with some return of his old grandiloquence.
"We pause hardly for an instant; then we begin to reconstruct--to
reconstruct."

"It's perfectly splendid of you," said the Duke, and his limpid eyes
rested on M. Formery's self-satisfied face in a really affectionate
gaze; they might almost be said to caress it.

Guerchard looked out of the window at a man who was carrying a hod-full
of bricks up one of the ladders set against the scaffolding of the
building house. Something in this honest workman's simple task seemed
to amuse him, for he smiled.

Only the inspector, thinking of the unexamined fireplace, looked really
depressed.

"We shan't get anything out of this woman till she wakes," said M.
Formery, "When she does, I shall question her closely and fully. In the
meantime, she may as well be carried up to her bedroom to sleep off the
effects of the chloroform."

Guerchard turned quickly: "Not her own bedroom, I think," he said
gently.

"Certainly not--of course, not her own bedroom," said M. Formery
quickly.

"And I think an officer at the door of whatever bedroom she does sleep
in," said Guerchard.

"Undoubtedly--most necessary," said M. Formery gravely. "See to it,
inspector. You can take her