ou some devoted person who'll
understand a mere sign, and whom you can safely trust. Count on me."

"Even to help me in killing some one?"

"The deuce! the deuce!" said Jacquet, repeating, as it were, the same
musical note. "I have two children and a wife."

Jules pressed his friend's hand and went away; but returned immediately.

"I forgot the letter," he said. "But that's not all, I must reseal it."

"The deuce! the deuce! you opened it without saving the seal; however,
it is still possible to restore it. Leave it with me and I'll bring it
to you _secundum scripturam_."

"At what time?"

"Half-past five."

"If I am not yet in, give it to the porter and tell him to send it up to
madame."

"Do you want me to-morrow?"

"No. Adieu."

Jules drove at once to the place de la Rotonde du Temple, where he left
his cabriolet and went on foot to the rue des Enfants-Rouges. He found
the house of Madame Etienne Gruget and examined it. There, the mystery
on which depended the fate of so many persons would be cleared up;
there, at this moment, was Ferragus, and to Ferragus all the threads of
this strange plot led. The Gordian knot of the drama, already so bloody,
was surely in a meeting between Madame Jules, her husband, and that man;
and a blade able to cut the closest of such knots would not be wanting.

The house was one of those which belong to the class called
_cabajoutis_. This significant name is given by the populace of Paris
to houses which are built, as it were, piecemeal. They are nearly
always composed of buildings originally separate but afterwards united
according to the fancy of the various proprietors who successively
enlarge them; or else they are houses begun, left unfinished, again
built upon, and completed,--unfortunate structures which have passed,
like certain peoples, under many dynasties of capricious masters.
Neither the floors nor the windows have an _ensemble_,--to borrow one of
the most picturesque terms of the art of painting; all is discord, even
the external decoration. The _cabajoutis_ is to Parisian architecture
what the _capharnaum_ is to the apartment,--a poke-hole, where the most
heterogeneous articles are flung pell-mell.

"Madame Etienne?" asked Jules of the portress.

This portress had her lodge under the main entrance, in a sort of
chicken coop, or wooden house on rollers, not unlike those sentry-boxes
which the police have lately set up by the stands of hackney-coaches.

"He