keys:

"The millions are ours," he said. "Baron, I forgive you!"

And then he gave a single bound backward, hiccoughing with fright. His
legs staggered beneath him. The keys jingled together in his fevered
hand with a sinister sound. And, for twenty, for thirty seconds, despite
the din that was being raised and the electric bells that kept ringing
through the house, he stood there, wild-eyed, gazing at the most
horrible, the most abominable sight: a woman's body, half-dressed, bent
in two in the safe, crammed in, like an over-large parcel ... and fair
hair hanging down ... and blood ... clots of blood ... and livid flesh,
blue in places, decomposing, flaccid.

"The baroness!" he gasped. "The baroness!... Oh, the monster!..."

He roused himself from his torpor, suddenly, to spit in the murderer's
face and pound him with his heels:

"Take that, you wretch!... Take that, you villain!... And, with it, the
scaffold, the bran-basket!..."

Meanwhile, shouts came from the upper floors in reply to the detectives'
ringing. Lupin heard footsteps scurrying down the stairs. It was time to
think of beating a retreat.

In reality, this did not trouble him greatly. During his conversation
with the baron, the enemy's extraordinary coolness had given him the
feeling that there must be a private outlet. Besides, how could the
baron have begun the fight, if he were not sure of escaping the police?

Lupin went into the next room. It looked out on the garden. At the
moment when the detectives were entering the house, he flung his legs
over the balcony and let himself down by a rain-pipe. He walked round
the building. On the opposite side was a wall lined with shrubs. He
slipped in between the shrubs and the wall and at once found a little
door which he easily opened with one of the keys on the bunch. All that
remained for him to do was to walk across a yard and pass through the
empty rooms of a lodge; and in a few moments he found himself in the Rue
du Faubourg Saint-Honore. Of course--and this he had reckoned on--the
police had not provided for this secret outlet.

* * * * *

"Well, what do you think of Baron Repstein?" cried Lupin, after giving
me all the details of that tragic night. "What a dirty scoundrel! And
how it teaches one to distrust appearances! I swear to you, the fellow
looked a thoroughly honest man!"

"But what about the millions?" I asked. "The princess's jewels?"

"They were in