eply. He stood thinking for a long time. Then, suddenly,
he said:

"Give me my hat... my coat..."

He hurried off, urged by an imperative idea. And, the moment he reached
the street, he sprang into a taxi:

"Rue Matignon, quick!..."

As soon as they came to the house where he had been robbed of the
crystal stopper, he jumped out of the cab, opened his private entrance,
went upstairs, ran to the drawing-room, turned on the light and crouched
at the foot of the door leading to his bedroom.

He had guessed right. One of the little panels was loosened in the same
manner.

And, just as in his other flat in the Rue Chateaubriand, the opening was
large enough to admit a man's arm and shoulder, but not to allow him to
draw the upper bolt.

"Hang!" he shouted, unable any longer to master the rage that had been
seething within him for the last two hours. "Blast! Shall I never have
finished with this confounded business?"

In fact, an incredible ill-luck seemed to dog his footsteps, compelling
him to grope about at random, without permitting him to use the elements
of success which his own persistency or the very force of things placed
within his grasp. Gilbert gave him the crystal stopper. Gilbert sent him
a letter. And both had disappeared at that very moment.

And it was not, as he had until then believed, a series of fortuitous
and independent circumstances. No, it was manifestly the effect of an
adverse will pursuing a definite object with prodigious ability and
incredible boldness, attacking him, Lupin, in the recesses of his safest
retreats and baffling him with blows so severe and so unexpected that he
did not even know against whom he had to defend himself. Never, in the
course of his adventures, had he encountered such obstacles as now.

And, little by little, deep down within himself, there grew a haunting
dread of the future. A date loomed before his eyes, the terrible date
which he unconsciously assigned to the law to perform its work of
vengeance, the date upon which, in the light of a wan April morning, two
men would mount the scaffold, two men who had stood by him, two comrades
whom he had been unable to save from paying the awful penalty...

CHAPTER III. THE HOME LIFE OF ALEXIS DAUBRECQ

When Daubrecq the deputy came in from lunch on the day after the police
had searched his house he was stopped by Clemence, his portress, who
told him that she had found a cook who could be thoroughly relied on.