upon he reached up inside that fiery furnace and, groping over the hot
stone shelf, brought down a scorched and battered and dust-covered little
figure that had lain there for many years.

It was the lost dolly!

CHAPTER XXX

MRS. LLOYD KITTREDGE

The details of the hours that followed remained blurred memories in the
minds of Alice and her rescuer. There was, first, a period of utter blank
when Coquenil, overcome by the violence of his struggle and the agony of
his burns, fell unconscious near the unconscious girl. How long they lay
thus in the dark playground of the fairies, so near the raging fire, yet
safe from it, was never known exactly; nor how long they wandered
afterwards through a strange subterranean region of passages and cross
passages, that widened and narrowed, that ascended and descended, that were
sometimes smooth under foot, but oftener blocked with rough stones and
always black as night. The fairies must have been sorry at their plight,
for, indeed, it was a pitiable one; bruised, blistered, covered with grime
and with little else, they stumbled on aimlessly, cutting their bare feet,
falling often in sheer weakness, and lying for minutes where they fell
before they could summon strength to stumble on. Surely no more pathetic
pair than these two ever braved the mazes of the Paris catacombs!

Perhaps the fairies finally felt that the odds were too great against them,
and somehow led them to safety. At any rate, through the ghastly horror of
darkness and weakness and pain there presently came hope--flickering
torches in the distance, then faint voices and the presence of friends,
some workingmen, occupied with drainage repairs, who produced stimulants
and rough garments and showed them the way to the upper world, to the
blessed sunshine.

Then it was a matter of temporary relief at the nearest pharmacy, of
waiting until Pougeot, summoned by telephone, could arrive with all haste
in an automobile.

An hour later M. Paul and Alice were in clean, cool beds at a private
hospital near the commissary's house, with nurses and doctors bending over
them. And on a chair beside the girl, battered and blackened, sat
Esmeralda, while under the detective's pillow was the scorched but unharmed
diary of De Heidelmann-Bruck!

"Both cases serious," was the head doctor's grave judgment. "The man is
frightfully burned. The girl's injuries are not so bad, but she is
suffering from shock. We'll know more in t