bert asked, amazed and startled. 'I understood
you to say that he was safely immured in the bedroom.'

'So he was,' Racksole replied. 'I went up there this afternoon, chiefly
to take him some food. The commissionaire was on guard at the door. He
had heard no noise, nothing unusual. Yet when I entered the room Jules
was gone.

He had by some means or other loosened his fastenings; he had then
managed to take the door off the wardrobe. He had moved the bed in front
of the window, and by pushing the wardrobe door three parts out of the
window and lodging the inside end of it under the rail at the head
of the bed, he had provided himself with a sort of insecure platform
outside the window. All this he did without making the least sound. He
must then have got through the window, and stood on the little platform.
With his fingers he would just be able to reach the outer edge of the
wide cornice under the roof of the hotel. By main strength of arms he
had swung himself on to this cornice, and so got on to the roof proper.
He would then have the run of the whole roof.

At the side of the building facing Salisbury Lane there is an iron
fire-escape, which runs right down from the ridge of the roof into a
little sunk yard level with the cellars. Jules must have thought that
his escape was accomplished. But it unfortunately happened that one rung
in the iron escape-ladder had rusted rotten through being badly painted.
It gave way, and Jules, not expecting anything of the kind, fell to the
ground. That was the end of all his cleverness and ingenuity.'

As Racksole ceased, speaking he replaced the linen cloth with a gesture
from which reverence was not wholly absent.

When the grave had closed over the dark and tempestuous career of Tom
Jackson, once the pride of the Grand Babylon, there was little trouble
for the people whose adventures we have described. Miss Spencer, that
yellow-haired, faithful slave and attendant of a brilliant scoundrel,
was never heard of again. Possibly to this day she survives, a
mystery to her fellow-creatures, in the pension of some cheap foreign
boarding-house. As for Rocco, he certainly was heard of again. Several
years after the events set down, it came to the knowledge of Felix
Babylon that the unrivalled Rocco had reached Buenos Aires, and by his
culinary skill was there making the fortune of a new and splendid hotel.
Babylon transmitted the information to Theodore Racksole, and Racksole
might, h