le. Fouchette the coast was
clear. There was no answer. He tried the door. It was locked. She had
turned the key on the inside.

"Mademoiselle! Come!"

He waited and listened. Not a sound.

"Mademoiselle! Ah, ca! He is gone long ago!"

Still not a stir. Perhaps she was asleep,--or, maybe,--why, she would
smother in that place!

He kicked the door impatiently. He got down upon his breast and put
his ear to the crevice below. If she were prostrated he might hear her
breathing.

All was silence.

This closet door was the merest sheathing, flush with the wall and
covered with the same paper, after the fashion of the ancient Parisian
appartements, and had nothing tangible to the grasp save the key,
which was now on the inside. Jean tried to jostle this out of place by
inserting other keys, but unsuccessfully.

"Sacre!" he cried, in despair; "but we'll see!"

And he hastily brought a combination poker and stove-lifter from the
kitchen, and, inserting the sharp end in the crack near the lock, gave
the improvised "jimmy" a vigorous wrench. The light wood-work flew in
splinters.

At the same moment the interior of the closet was thus suddenly
exposed to the uninterrupted view.

Jean recoiled in astonishment that was almost terror. If he had been
confronted with the suspended corpse of Mlle. Fouchette he could have
scarcely been more startled.

For Mlle. Fouchette was not there!

The cold sweat started out of him. He felt among his clothes,--passed
his hand over the three remaining walls. They appeared solid enough.

"Que diable! but where is she, then?" he muttered.

He was dazed,--rendered incapable of reasoning. He went around vaguely
examining his rooms, peering behind curtains and even moving bits of
furniture, as if Mlle. Fouchette were the elusive collar-button and
might have rolled out of sight somewhere among the furniture.

"Peste! this is astonishing!"

All of this time there was the lock with the key on the inside.
Without being a spiritualist, Jean felt that nobody but spirits could
come out of a room leaving the doors locked and the keys on the
inside. But for that lock, he might have even set it down to optical
illusion and have persuaded himself that perhaps she had really never
entered that place at all.

As Jean Marot was not wholly given to illusions or superstitions, he
logically concluded that there was some other outlet to that closet.

"And why such a thing as that?" he asked himse