he young woman sitting beside his sick-bed,
nursing the man whom she had wounded, admiring his pluck and gaiety,
becoming attached to him, falling in love with him and thrice over,
probably in spite of herself, under a sort of instinctive impulse, amid
fits of spite and rage, saving him from death.

And all this was so strange, so unforeseen; Lupin was so much unmanned
by his astonishment, that, this time, he did not try to retain her when
she made for the door, backward, without taking her eyes from him.

She lowered her head, smiled for an instant and disappeared.

He rang the bell, quickly:

"Follow that woman," he said to his man. "Or no, stay where you are....
After all, it is better so...."

He sat brooding for a while, possessed by the girl's image. Then he
revolved in his mind all that curious, stirring and tragic adventure, in
which he had been so very near succumbing; and, taking a hand-glass from
the table, he gazed for a long time and with a certain self-complacency
at his features, which illness and pain had not succeeded in impairing
to any great extent:

"Good looks count for something, after all!" he muttered.

V

THE RED SILK SCARF

On leaving his house one morning, at his usual early hour for going to
the Law Courts, Chief-inspector Ganimard noticed the curious behaviour
of an individual who was walking along the Rue Pergolese in front of
him. Shabbily dressed and wearing a straw hat, though the day was the
first of December, the man stooped at every thirty or forty yards to
fasten his boot-lace, or pick up his stick, or for some other reason.
And, each time, he took a little piece of orange-peel from his pocket
and laid it stealthily on the curb of the pavement. It was probably a
mere display of eccentricity, a childish amusement to which no one else
would have paid attention; but Ganimard was one of those shrewd
observers who are indifferent to nothing that strikes their eyes and who
are never satisfied until they know the secret cause of things. He
therefore began to follow the man.

Now, at the moment when the fellow was turning to the right, into the
Avenue de la Grande-Armee, the inspector caught him exchanging signals
with a boy of twelve or thirteen, who was walking along the houses on
the left-hand side. Twenty yards farther, the man stooped and turned up
the bottom of his trousers legs. A bit of orange-peel marked the place.
At the same moment, the boy stopped and, with a