d Sally.

The young man acknowledged receipt of this thrust by dropping his hat
and tripping over it as he stooped to pick it up.

Jules, meanwhile, who had been navigating in a sort of somnambulistic
trance in the neighbourhood of the lift, now threw back the cage with a
rattle.

"It's a shame to have woken you up," said Sally, commiseratingly,
stepping in.

Jules did not reply, for the excellent reason that he had not been
woken up. Constant practice enabled him to do this sort of work without
breaking his slumber. His brain, if you could call it that, was working
automatically. He had shut up the gate with a clang and was tugging
sluggishly at the correct rope, so that the lift was going slowly up
instead of retiring down into the basement, but he was not awake.

Sally and the red-haired young man sat side by side on the small seat,
watching their conductor's efforts. After the first spurt, conversation
had languished. Sally had nothing of immediate interest to say, and her
companion seemed to be one of these strong, silent men you read about.
Only a slight snore from Jules broke the silence.

At the third floor Sally leaned forward and prodded Jules in the lower
ribs. All through her stay at Roville, she had found in dealing with the
native population that actions spoke louder than words. If she wanted
anything in a restaurant or at a shop, she pointed; and, when she wished
the lift to stop, she prodded the man in charge. It was a system worth a
dozen French conversation books.

Jules brought the machine to a halt: and it was at this point that
he should have done the one thing connected with his professional
activities which he did really well--the opening, to wit, of the iron
cage. There are ways of doing this. Jules' was the right way. He was
accustomed to do it with a flourish, and generally remarked "V'la!" in
a modest but self-congratulatory voice as though he would have liked
to see another man who could have put through a job like that. Jules'
opinion was that he might not be much to look at, but that he could open
a lift door.

To-night, however, it seemed as if even this not very exacting feat was
beyond his powers. Instead of inserting his key in the lock, he stood
staring in an attitude of frozen horror. He was a man who took most
things in life pretty seriously, and whatever was the little difficulty
just now seemed to have broken him all up.

"There appears," said Sally, turning to her compa