pened. The inspector drew his revolver, and entered the
house. The Duke followed him. The policemen drew their revolvers, and
followed the Duke. The big hall was but dimly lighted. One of the
policemen quickly threw back the shutters of the windows and let in the
light. The hall was empty, the furniture in perfect order; there were
no signs of burglary there.

"The concierge?" said the inspector, and his men hurried through the
little door on the right which opened into the concierge's rooms. In
half a minute one of them came out and said: "Gagged and bound, and his
wife too."

"But the rooms which were to be plundered are upstairs," said the
Duke--"the big drawing-rooms on the first floor. Come on; we may be
just in time. The scoundrels may not yet have got away."

He ran quickly up the stairs, followed by the inspector, and hurried
along the corridor to the door of the big drawing-room. He threw it
open, and stopped dead on the threshold. He had arrived too late.

The room was in disorder. Chairs were overturned, there were empty
spaces on the wall where the finest pictures of the millionaire had
been hung. The window facing the door was wide open. The shutters were
broken; one of them was hanging crookedly from only its bottom hinge.
The top of a ladder rose above the window-sill, and beside it,
astraddle the sill, was an Empire card-table, half inside the room,
half out. On the hearth-rug, before a large tapestry fire-screen, which
masked the wide fireplace, built in imitation of the big, wide
fireplaces of our ancestors, and rose to the level of the
chimney-piece-a magnificent chimney-piece in carved oak-were some
chairs tied together ready to be removed.

The Duke and the inspector ran to the window, and looked down into the
garden. It was empty. At the further end of it, on the other side of
its wall, rose the scaffolding of a house a-building. The burglars had
found every convenience to their hand-a strong ladder, an egress
through the door in the garden wall, and then through the gap formed by
the house in process of erection, which had rendered them independent
of the narrow passage between the walls of the gardens, which debouched
into a side-street on the right.

The Duke turned from the window, glanced at the wall opposite, then, as
if something had caught his eye, went quickly to it.

"Look here," he said, and he pointed to the middle of one of the empty
spaces in which a picture had hung.

There