Not only this, but the fear of making a noise kept him motionless.  As a matter of fact, he was close to two rooms occupied by the detectives, first the boudoir and then the study, for the boudoir, as he knew, was over that part of his study which included the telephone box.

The thought of this suggested another.  On reflection, remembering that he used sometimes to wonder how Count Malonyi’s ancestress had managed to keep alive behind the curtain on the days when she had to hide there, he realized that there must have been a communication between the secret passage and what was now the telephone box, a communication too narrow to admit a person’s body, but serving as a ventilating shaft.

As a precaution, in case the secret passage was discovered, a stone concealed the upper aperture of this shaft.  Count Malonyi must have closed up the lower end when he restored the wainscoting of the study.

So there he was, imprisoned in the thickness of the walls, with no very definite intention beyond that of escaping from the clutches of the police.  More hours passed.

Gradually, tortured with hunger and thirst, he fell into a heavy sleep, disturbed by painful nightmares which he would have given much to be able to throw off.  But he slept too deeply to recover consciousness until eight o’clock in the evening.

When he woke up, feeling very tired, he saw his position in an unexpectedly hideous light and, at the same time, so accurately that, yielding to a sudden change of opinion marked by no little fear, he resolved to leave his hiding-place and give himself up.  Anything was better than the torture which he was enduring and the dangers to which longer waiting exposed him.

But, on turning round to reach the entrance to his hole, he perceived first that the stone did not swing over when merely pushed, and, next, after several attempts, that he could not manage to find the mechanism which no doubt worked the stone.  He persisted.  His exertions were all in vain.  The stone did not budge.  Only, at each exertion, a few bits of stone came crumbling from the upper part of the wall and still further narrowed the space in which he was able to move.

It cost him a considerable effort to master his excitement and to say, jokingly: 

“That’s capital!  I shall be reduced now to calling for help.  I, Arsene Lupin!  Yes, to call in the help of those gentlemen of the police.  Otherwise, the odds on my being buried alive will increase every minute.  They’re ten to one as it is!”

He clenched his fists.

“Hang it!  I’ll get out of this scrape by myself!  Call for help?  Not if I know it!”

He summoned up all his energies to think, but his jaded brain gave him none but confused and disconnected ideas.  He was haunted by Florence’s image and by Marie Fauville’s as well.

“It’s to-night that I’m to save them,” he said to himself.  “And I certainly will save them, as they are not guilty and as I know the real criminal.  But how shall I set about it to succeed?”