ray-haired lady; the spying of which he himself was the object.

"Steady, Lupin," he said. "One only argues falsely in a fever. So hold
your tongue. No inferences, above all things! Nothing is more
foolish than to infer one fact from another before finding a certain
starting-point. That's where you get up a tree. Listen to your instinct.
Act according to your instinct. And as you are persuaded, outside all
argument, outside all logic, one might say, that this business turns
upon that confounded stopper, go for it boldly. Have at Daubrecq and his
bit of crystal!"

Lupin did not wait to arrive at these conclusions before settling his
actions accordingly. At the moment when he was stating them in his mind,
three days after the scene at the Vaudeville, he was sitting, dressed
like a retired tradesman, in an old overcoat, with a muffler round his
neck, on a bench in the Avenue Victor-Hugo, at some distance from the
Square Lamartine. Victoire had his instructions to pass by that bench at
the same hour every morning.

"Yes," he repeated to himself, "the crystal stopper: everything turns on
that... Once I get hold of it..."

Victoire arrived, with her shopping-basket on her arm. He at once
noticed her extraordinary agitation and pallor:

"What's the matter?" asked Lupin, walking beside his old nurse.

She went into a big grocer's, which was crowded with people, and,
turning to him:

"Here," she said, in a voice torn with excitement. "Here's what you've
been hunting for."

And, taking something from her basket, she gave it to him.

Lupin stood astounded: in his hand lay the crystal stopper.

"Can it be true? Can it be true?" he muttered, as though the ease of the
solution had thrown him off his balance.

But the fact remained, visible and palpable. He recognized by its shape,
by its size, by the worn gilding of its facets, recognized beyond any
possible doubt the crystal stopper which he had seen before. He even
remarked a tiny, hardly noticeable little scratch on the stem which he
remembered perfectly.

However, while the thing presented all the same characteristics, it
possessed no other that seemed out of the way. It was a crystal stopper,
that was all. There was no really special mark to distinguish it from
other stoppers. There was no sign upon it, no stamp; and, being cut from
a single piece, it contained no foreign object.

"What then?"

And Lupin received a quick insight into the depth of his mistake. Wh