quickly smothered.

My very heart stood still. The next moment, however, the gendarme had
kicked open the door of No. 25, and I followed him into the room. The
place looked dirty and squalid in the extreme--just the sort of place
I should have expected Theodore to haunt. It was almost bare save for
a table in the centre, a couple of rickety chairs, a broken-down
bedstead and an iron stove in the corner. On the table a tallow candle
was spluttering and throwing a very feeble circle of light around.

At first glance I thought that the room was empty, then suddenly I
heard another violent expletive and became aware of a man sitting
close beside the iron stove. He turned to stare at us as we entered,
but to my surprise it was not Theodore's ugly face which confronted
us. The man sitting there alone in the room where I had expected to
see Theodore and Carissimo had a shaggy beard of an undoubted ginger
hue. He had on a blue blouse and a peaked cap; beneath his cap his
lank hair protruded more decided in colour even than his beard. His
head was sunk between his shoulders, and right across his face, from
the left eyebrow over the cheek and as far as his ear, he had a
hideous crimson scar, which told up vividly against the ghastly pallor
of his face.

But there was no sign of Theodore!

At first my friend the gendarme was quite urbane. He asked very
politely to see Monsieur's pet dog. Monsieur denied all knowledge of a
dog, which denial only tended to establish his own guilt and the
veracity of mine own narrative. The gendarme thereupon became more
peremptory and the man promptly lost his temper.

I, in the meanwhile, was glancing round the room and soon spied a wall
cupboard which had obviously been deliberately screened by the
bedstead. While my companion was bringing the whole majesty of the law
to bear upon the miscreant's denegations I calmly dragged the bedstead
aside and opened the cupboard door.

An ejaculation from my quivering throat brought the gendarme to my
side. Crouching in the dark recess of the wall cupboard was
Carissimo--not dead, thank goodness! but literally shaking with
terror. I pulled him out as gently as I could, for he was so
frightened that he growled and snapped viciously at me. I handed him
to the gendarme, for by the side of Carissimo I had seen something
which literally froze my blood within my veins. It was Theodore's hat
and coat, which he had been wearing when I chased him to this house