atened them.

"Help! Help!"

Fauville's house would be blown up in three or four hours. That he knew
with the greatest certainty. Just as punctually as the mysterious letters
had reached their destination in spite of all the obstacles in the way,
so the explosion would occur at the hour named. The infernal artificer of
the accursed work had wished it so. At three o'clock in the morning there
would be nothing left of the Fauvilles' house.

"Help! Help!"

He recovered enough strength to raise desperate shouts and to make his
voice carry beyond the stones and beyond the wainscoting.

Then, when there seemed to be no answer to his call, he stopped
and listened for a long time. There was not a sound. The silence
was absolute.

Thereupon a terrible anguish covered him with a cold sweat. Supposing the
detectives had ceased to watch the upper floors and confined themselves
to spending the night in the rooms on the ground floor?

He madly took a brick and struck it repeatedly against the stone that
closed the entrance, hoping that the noise would spread through the
house. But an avalanche of small stones, loosened by the blows, at once
fell upon him, knocking him down again and fixing him where he lay.

"Help! Help!"

More silence--a great, ruthless silence.

"Help! Help!"

He felt that his shouts did not penetrate the walls that stifled him.
Besides, his voice was growing fainter and fainter, producing a hoarse
groan that died away in his strained throat.

He ceased his cries and again listened, with all his anxious attention,
to the great silence that surrounded as with layers of lead the stone
coffin in which he lay imprisoned. Still nothing, not a sound. No one
would come, no one could come to his assistance.

He continued to be haunted by Florence's name and image. And he thought
also of Marie Fauville, whom he had promised to save. But Marie would die
of starvation. And, like her, like Gaston Sauverand and so many others,
he in his turn was the victim of this monstrous horror.

An incident occurred to increase his dismay. All of a sudden his electric
lantern, which he had left alight to dispel the terrors of the darkness,
went out. It was eleven o'clock at night.

He was overcome with a fit of giddiness. He could hardly breathe in the
close and vitiated air. His brain suffered, as it were, a physical and
exceedingly painful ailment, from the repetition of images that seemed to
encrust themselves there; a