ed, however, Isidore, who was
watching by his side, observed that the breathing became stronger and
that his whole being appeared to be throwing off the invisible bonds
that paralyzed it.

At daybreak, he woke up and resumed his normal functions: ate, drank
and moved about. But, the whole day long, he was unable to reply to the
young man's questions and his brain seemed as though still numbed by an
inexplicable torpor.

The next day, he asked Beautrelet:

"What are you doing here, eh?"

It was the first time that he had shown surprise at the presence of a
stranger beside him.

Gradually, in this way, he recovered all his faculties. He talked. He
made plans. But, when Beautrelet asked him about the events immediately
preceding his sleep, he seemed not to understand.

And Beautrelet felt that he really did not understand. He had lost the
recollection of all that had happened since the Friday before. It was
like a sudden gap in the ordinary flow of his life. He described his
morning and afternoon on the Friday, the purchases he had made at the
fair, the meals he had taken at the inn. Then--nothing--nothing more.
He believed himself to be waking on the morrow of that day.

It was horrible for Beautrelet. The truth lay there, in those eyes
which had seen the walls of the park behind which his father was
waiting for him, in those hands which had picked up the letter, in that
muddled brain which had recorded the whereabouts of that scene, the
setting, the little corner of the world in which the play had been
enacted. And from those hands, from that brain he was unable to extract
the faintest echo of the truth so near at hand!

Oh, that impalpable and formidable obstacle, against which all his
efforts hurled themselves in vain, that obstacle built up of silence
and oblivion! How clearly it bore the mark of Arsene Lupin! He alone,
informed, no doubt, that M. Beautrelet had attempted to give a signal,
he alone could have struck with partial death the one man whose
evidence could injure him. It was not that Beautrelet felt himself to
be discovered or thought that Lupin, hearing of his stealthy attack and
knowing that a letter had reached him, was defending himself against
him personally. But what an amount of foresight and real intelligence
it displayed to suppress any possible accusation on the part of that
chance wayfarer! Nobody now knew that within the walls of a park there
lay a prisoner asking for help.

Nobody?