aven that the arrest shall be effected by my own
means, without my employing a single one of the clues with which that
villain has supplied me. Ah, no! Ah, no!..."

Railing against Lupin, furious at being mixed up in this business and
resolved, nevertheless, to get to the bottom of it, he wandered
aimlessly about the streets. His brain was seething with irritation; and
he tried to adjust his ideas a little and to discover, among the chaotic
facts, some trifling detail, unperceived by all, unsuspected by Lupin
himself, that might lead him to success.

He lunched hurriedly at a bar, resumed his stroll and suddenly stopped,
petrified, astounded and confused. He was walking under the gateway of
the very house in the Rue de Surene to which Lupin had enticed him a few
hours earlier! A force stronger than his own will was drawing him there
once more. The solution of the problem lay there. There and there alone
were all the elements of the truth. Do and say what he would, Lupin's
assertions were so precise, his calculations so accurate, that, worried
to the innermost recesses of his being by so prodigious a display of
perspicacity, he could not do other than take up the work at the point
where his enemy had left it.

Abandoning all further resistance, he climbed the three flights of
stairs. The door of the flat was open. No one had touched the exhibits.
He put them in his pocket and walked away.

From that moment, he reasoned and acted, so to speak, mechanically,
under the influence of the master whom he could not choose but obey.

Admitting that the unknown person whom he was seeking lived in the
neighbourhood of the Pont-Neuf, it became necessary to discover,
somewhere between that bridge and the Rue de Berne, the first-class
confectioner's shop, open in the evenings, at which the cakes were
bought. This did not take long to find. A pastry-cook near the Gare
Saint-Lazare showed him some little cardboard boxes, identical in
material and shape with the one in Ganimard's possession. Moreover, one
of the shop-girls remembered having served, on the previous evening, a
gentleman whose face was almost concealed in the collar of his fur coat,
but whose eyeglass she had happened to notice.

"That's one clue checked," thought the inspector. "Our man wears an
eyeglass."

He next collected the pieces of the racing-paper and showed them to a
newsvendor, who easily recognized the _Turf Illustre_. Ganimard at once
went to the office