o, begone!"

He gave the old servant a gentle push and, in a more serious tone:

"Go home, Victoire, and don't upset yourself. Of course, some one saw
you give me the stopper and took advantage of the crowd in the shop to
pick my pocket of it. That only shows that we are watched more closely
than I thought and by adversaries of the first rank. But, once more, be
easy. Honest men always come by their own... Have you anything else to
tell me?"

"Yes. Some one came yesterday evening, while M. Daubrecq was out. I saw
lights reflected upon the trees in the garden."

"The portress' bedroom?"

"The portress was up."

"Then it was some of those detective-fellows; they are still hunting.
I'll see you later, Victoire. You must let me in again."

"What! You want to..."

"What do I risk? Your room is on the third floor. Daubrecq suspects
nothing."

"But the others!"

"The others? If it was to their interest to play me a trick, they'd have
tried before now. I'm in their way, that's all. They're not afraid of
me. So till later, Victoire, at five o'clock exactly."

One further surprise awaited Lupin. In the evening his old nurse told
him that, having opened the drawer of the bedside table from curiosity,
she had found the crystal stopper there again.

Lupin was no longer to be excited by these miraculous incidents. He
simply said to himself:

"So it's been brought back. And the person who brought it back and who
enters this house by some unexplained means considered, as I did, that
the stopper ought not to disappear. And yet Daubrecq, who knows that he
is being spied upon to his very bedroom, has once more left the stopper
in a drawer, as though he attached no importance to it at all! Now what
is one to make of that?"

Though Lupin did not make anything of it, nevertheless he could not
escape certain arguments, certain associations of ideas that gave him
the same vague foretaste of light which one receives on approaching the
outlet of a tunnel.

"It is inevitable, as the case stands," he thought, "that there must
soon be an encounter between myself and the others. From that moment I
shall be master of the situation."

Five days passed, during which Lupin did not glean the slightest
particular. On the sixth day Daubrecq received a visit, in the small
hours, from a gentleman, Laybach the deputy, who, like his colleagues,
dragged himself at his feet in despair and, when all was done, handed
him twenty thousand franc