“Well?”

“The beggar went back into the cellar.”

Weber gave a shout of delight.

“We’ve got him!  And it’s a nasty business for him!  Charge of resisting the police!...  Complicity ...  We shall be able to unmask him at last.  Tally-ho, my lads, tally-ho!  Two men to guard Sauverand, four men on the Place du Palais-Bourbon, revolver in hand.  Two men on the roof.  The rest stick to me.  We’ll begin with the Levasseur girl’s room and we’ll take his room next.  Hark, forward, my lads!”

Don Luis did not wait for the enemies’ attack.  Knowing their intentions, he beat a retreat, unseen, toward Florence’s rooms.  Here, as Weber did not yet know the short cut through the outhouses, he had time to make sure that the trapdoor was in perfect working order, and that there was no reason why they should discover the existence of a secret cupboard at the back of the alcove, behind the curtains of the bed.

Once inside the passage, he went up the first staircase, followed the long corridor contrived in the wall, climbed the ladder leading to the boudoir, and, perceiving that this second trapdoor fitted the woodwork so closely that no one could suspect anything, he closed it over him.  A few minutes later he heard the noise of men making a search above his head.

And so, on the twenty-fourth of May, at five o’clock in the afternoon, the position was as follows:  Florence Levasseur with a warrant out against her, Gaston Sauverand in prison, Marie Fauville in prison and refusing all food, and Don Luis, who believed in their innocence and who alone could have saved them, Don Luis was being blockaded in his own house and hunted down by a score of detectives.

As for the Mornington inheritance, there could be no more question of that, because the legatee, in his turn, had set himself in open rebellion against society.

“Capital!” said Don Luis, with a grin.  “This is life as I understand it.  The question is a simple one and may be put in different ways.  How can a wretched, unwashed beggar, with not a penny in his pocket, make a fortune in twenty-four hours without setting foot outside his hovel?  How can a general, with no soldiers and no ammunition left, win a battle which he has lost?  In short, how shall I, Arsene Lupin, manage to be present to-morrow evening at the meeting which will be held on the Boulevard Suchet and to behave in such a way as to save Marie Fauville, Florence Levasseur, Gaston Sauverand, and my excellent friend Don Luis Perenna in the bargain?”

Dull blows came from somewhere.  The men must be hunting the roofs and sounding the walls.

Don Luis stretched himself flat on the floor, hid his face in his folded arms and, shutting his eyes, murmured: 

“Let’s think.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

“HELP!”

When Lupin afterward told me this episode of the tragic story, he said, not without a certain self-complacency: