danger with him. He has promised and he will keep his
word. If my head were off, he'd come and clap it on my shoulders
and firmly! Arsene Lupin allow his chum Gilbert to die? Not he!
Excuse my humour!'

"There is a certain touching frankness in all this enthusiasm
which is not without a dignity of its own. We shall see if Arsene
Lupin deserves the confidence so blindly placed in him."

Lupin was hardly able to finish reading the article for the tears that
dimmed his eyes: tears of affection, tears of pity, tears of distress.

No, he did not deserve the confidence of his chum Gilbert. Certainly, he
had performed impossibilities; but there are circumstances in which we
must perform more than impossibilities, in which we must show ourselves
stronger than fate; and, this time, fate had been stronger than he. Ever
since the first day and throughout this lamentable adventure, events had
gone contrary to his anticipations, contrary to logic itself. Clarisse
and he, though pursuing an identical aim, had wasted weeks in fighting
each other. Then, at the moment when they were uniting their efforts, a
series of ghastly disasters had come one after the other: the kidnapping
of little Jacques, Daubrecq's disappearance, his imprisonment in the
Lovers' Tower, Lupin's wound, his enforced inactivity, followed by the
cunning manoeuvres that dragged Clarisse--and Lupin after her--to
the south, to Italy. And then, as a crowning catastrophe, when, after
prodigies of will-power, after miracles of perseverance, they were
entitled to think that the Golden Fleece was won, it all came to
nothing. The list of the Twenty-seven had no more value than the most
insignificant scrap of paper.

"The game's up!" said Lupin. "It's an absolute defeat. What if I do
revenge myself on Daubrecq, ruin him and destroy him? He is the real
victor, once Gilbert is going to die."

He wept anew, not with spite or rage, but with despair. Gilbert was
going to die! The lad whom he called his chum, the best of his pals
would be gone for ever, in a few hours. He could not save him. He was at
the end of his tether. He did not even look round for a last expedient.
What was the use?

And his persuasion of his own helplessness was so deep, so definite that
he felt no shock of any kind on receiving a telegram from the Masher
that said:

"Motor accident. Essential part broken. Long repair.
Arrive to-morrow morning."

It was a last proof to show that f