"

Juve started forward.

"The Baron de Naarboveck asks for me?... Where? Since when?"

"Why Monsieur Juve, I have just this moment left him at the entrance
to the ball-rooms. He had just come out of here!... But why are you
putting all this furniture in the gallery?"

"What of the Baron, Mademoiselle?" cried Juve, on tenterhooks.

"Ah, yes! The Baron said to me: 'Wilhelmine, I feel a little tired,
and am going up to my room for a few minutes; but go to Monsieur Juve,
and tell him.'"...

Not waiting to hear more, Juve rushed out to the gallery, but only to
stop dead.... He had run up against a large, an unusually large,
arm-chair standing apart. Thus isolated, it was remarkable. Juve
paused to examine it. This arm-chair was astonishing, extraordinary!
Yes--it opened in the middle--a kind of a double chair! Why--the
interior could hold a man who knew how to pack himself in! It had a
false bottom with a spring! One in hiding could escape that way!...
Once closed on the person concealed within, the chair looked empty. A
most ingenious hide-hole! Juve now knew the answer to the riddle of
the bandit's disappearance. Within an ace of arrest, he had seized the
chance offered by Juve's interchange of glances with the king, and
with an acrobat's agility had slipped inside this chair! No sooner was
the chair abandoned in the gallery than de Naarboveck-Fantomas had
slipped out and away. When leaving his magnificent house forever, and
all the securities and privileges of his position, he had sent
Wilhelmine to announce his escape to Juve! Could cynicism--could
mordant irony go further?

Juve felt crushed. It was too, too much.

"What ails you, Juve?" asked a gentle voice beside him. It was Fandor,
who, knowing nothing of what had passed, but suspecting there was
mischief afoot, had come in search of Juve. Had he not seen the
diplomat whom he knew to be Fantomas, and Fantomas on the point of
being arrested, cross the ballroom rapidly and disappear in the crowd
of dancers?

Juve could not find words for speech.

Great tears rolled down his cheeks, hollowed and lined with an immense
fatigue.

At last he gave low utterance to his feelings.

"Fantomas! I had got him!... And it was I who had that cursed chair
taken out of the library--I did it ... I!... It is thanks to me!"

Juve could not continue. He burst into tears in the arms of his
devoted friend....

Once again Juve had suffered shipwreck when coming into harbou