ve me permission to remain, I can at any rate cast a rapid
glance round that ill-omened little cell!"

Fandor followed, at a distance, the wavering steps of the poor girl whom
Monsieur Fuselier was supporting with fatherly care.

When they paused before one of the cells pointed out by the head warder,
Monsieur Fuselier turned to Elizabeth Dollon:

"Do you think you are strong enough to bear this trial, mademoiselle?...
You are determined to see your brother?"

Elizabeth bent her head; the magistrate turned towards the warder:

"Open," said he. As the key was turned in the lock he said: "According
to instructions from the Head, we have placed him on his bed again....
There is nothing to frighten you ... he seems to be asleep.... Now
then!"

But as he opened the door, stretching his arm in the direction of the
bed where the body of Jacques Dollon should be, an oath escaped him:

"Great Heavens! The dead man is gone!"

In this cell with its bare walls, its sole furniture an iron bedstead
and a stool riveted to the floor, in this little cell which the eye
could glance round in a second, there was no vestige of a corpse:
Jacques Dollon's body was not there!

"You have mistaken the cell," said the magistrate sharply.

"No, no!" cried the astounded warder.

"You can see, can't you, that Jacques Dollon is not there?"

"He was there a few minutes ago!"

"Then they must have taken him somewhere else!"

"The keys have never left me!"

"Oh, come now!"

"No, sir. He was there ... now he isn't there! That's all I know!...
Hey! You down there!" yelled the warder: "Who knows what has become of
the corpse of cell 12?... The corpse we laid out just now?"

One after the other the warders came running. All confirmed what their
chief had said: the dead body of Jacques Dollon had been left there,
lying on the bed: not a soul had entered the cell: not a soul had
touched the corpse!... Yet it was no longer there! Jerome Fandor, well
in the background, followed the scene with an ironical smile. The
frantic warders, the growing stupefaction of Monsieur Fuselier, amused
him prodigiously. The magistrate was trying to understand the how, why,
and wherefore of this incredible disappearance:

"As this man is not here, he cannot have been dead ... he has escaped
... but if he wanted to escape he must have been guilty!... Oh, I cannot
make head or tail of it!"

Seizing the head warder by the shoulders, almost roughly, Monsieur
F