rain-de-luxe, at six-thirty: she made up her mind at the last
moment, she told me to say. And I was also to say that the gentleman was
in the same train and that they were going to Monte Carlo."

"Damn it!" muttered Lupin. "We ought to have taken the express just now!
There's nothing left but the evening trains, and they crawl! We've lost
over three hours."

The wait seemed interminable. They booked their seats. They telephoned
to the proprietor of the Hotel Franklin to send on their letters to
Monte Carlo. They dined. They read the papers. At last, at half-past
nine, the train started.

And so, by a really tragic series of circumstances, at the most critical
moment of the contest, Lupin was turning his back on the battlefield and
going away, at haphazard, to seek, he knew not where, and beat, he knew
not how, the most formidable and elusive enemy that he had ever fought.

And this was happening four days, five days at most, before the
inevitable execution of Gilbert and Vaucheray.

It was a bad and painful night for Lupin. The more he studied the
situation the more terrible it appeared to him. On every side he was
faced with uncertainty, darkness, confusion, helplessness.

True, he knew the secret of the crystal stopper. But how was he to know
that Daubrecq would not change or had not already changed his tactics?
How was he to know that the list of the Twenty-seven was still inside
that crystal stopper or that the crystal stopper was still inside the
object where Daubrecq had first hidden it?

And there was a further serious reason for alarm in the fact that
Clarisse Mergy thought that she was shadowing and watching Daubrecq at
a time when, on the contrary, Daubrecq was watching her, having her
shadowed and dragging her, with diabolical cleverness, toward the places
selected by himself, far from all help or hope of help.

Oh, Daubrecq's game was clear as daylight! Did not Lupin know the
unhappy woman's hesitations? Did he not know--and the Growler and the
Masher confirmed it most positively--that Clarisse looked upon the
infamous bargain planned by Daubrecq in the light of a possible, an
acceptable thing? In that case, how could he, Lupin, succeed? The logic
of events, so powerfully moulded by Daubrecq, led to a fatal result: the
mother must sacrifice herself and, to save her son, throw her scruples,
her repugnance, her very honour, to the winds!

"Oh, you scoundrel!" snarled Lupin, in a fit of rage. "If I get