tle, loosen it, draw it back, unfold the yellow paper, remove the
tobacco and fasten it up again. Observe also that all we had to do, in
Paris, was to take the packet in our hands and examine it, in order to
discover the hiding-place. No matter! The packet itself, the plug of
Maryland made up and passed by the State and by the Inland Revenue
Office, was a sacred, intangible thing, a thing above suspicion! And
nobody opened it. That was how that demon of a Daubrecq allowed that
untouched packet of tobacco to lie about for months on his table, among
his pipes and among other unopened packets of tobacco. And no power on
earth could have given any one even the vaguest notion of looking into
that harmless little cube. I would have you observe, besides..." Lupin
went on pursuing his remarks relative to the packet of Maryland and the
crystal stopper. His adversary's ingenuity and shrewdness interested him
all the more inasmuch as Lupin had ended by getting the better of him.
But to Clarisse these topics mattered much less than did her anxiety as
to the acts which must be performed to save her son; and she sat wrapped
in her own thoughts and hardly listened to him.

* The department of the French excise which holds the
monopoly for the manufacture and sale of tobacco, cigars,
cigarettes and matches--Translator's Note.

"Are you sure," she kept on repeating, "that you will succeed?"

"Absolutely sure."

"But Prasville is not in Paris."

"If he's not there, he's at the Havre. I saw it in the paper yesterday.
In any case, a telegram will bring him to Paris at once."

"And do you think that he has enough influence?"

"To obtain the pardon of Vaucheray and Gilbert personally. No. If he
had, we should have set him to work before now. But he is intelligent
enough to understand the value of what we are bringing him and to act
without a moment's delay."

"But, to be accurate, are you not deceived as to that value?"

"Was Daubrecq deceived? Was Daubrecq not in a better position than
any of us to know the full power of that paper? Did he not have twenty
proofs of it, each more convincing than the last? Think of all that he
was able to do, for the sole reason that people knew him to possess the
list. They knew it; and that was all. He did not use the list, but he
had it. And, having it, he killed your husband. He built up his fortune
on the ruin and the disgrace of the Twenty-seven. Only last week, one of
the gam