"

"Through this door, which opens on the garden, and through the gate that
opens on the Boulevard Suchet."

"Then they had keys to the locks and bolts?"

"False keys, yes."

"But the policemen watching the house outside?"

"They are still watching it, as that sort watch a house, walking from
point to point without thinking that people can slip into a garden
while they have their backs turned. That's what took place in coming
and going."

Sergeant Mazeroux seemed flabbergasted. The criminals' daring, their
skill, the precision of their acts bewildered him.

"They're deuced clever," he said.

"Deuced clever, Mazeroux, as you say; and I foresee a tremendous battle.
By Jupiter, with what a vim they set to work!"

The telephone bell rang. Don Luis left Mazeroux to his conversation with
the Prefect, and, taking the bunch of keys, easily unfastened the lock
and the bolt of the door and went out into the garden, in the hope of
there finding some trace that should facilitate his quest.

As on the day before, he saw, through the ivy, two policemen walking
between one lamp-post and the next. They did not see him. Moreover,
anything that might happen inside the house appeared to be to them a
matter of total indifference.

"That's my great mistake," said Perenna to himself. "It doesn't do to
entrust a job to people who do not suspect its importance."

His investigations led to the discovery of some traces of footsteps on
the gravel, traces not sufficiently plain to enable him to distinguish
the shape of the shoes that had left them, yet distinct enough to confirm
his supposition. The scoundrels had been that way.

Suddenly he gave a movement of delight. Against the border of the path,
among the leaves of a little clump of rhododendrons, he saw something
red, the shape of which at once struck him. He stooped. It was an
apple, the fourth apple, the one whose absence from the fruit dish he
had noticed.

"Excellent!" he said. "Hippolyte Fauville did not eat it. One of them
must have carried it away--a fit of appetite, a sudden hunger--and it
must have rolled from his hand without his having time to look for it and
pick it up."

He took up the fruit and examined it.

"What!" he exclaimed, with a start. "Can it be possible?"

He stood dumfounded, a prey to real excitement, refusing to admit the
inadmissible thing which nevertheless presented itself to his eyes
with the direct evidence of actuality. Some one had bitt