“It’s all up with you this time, Chief!” he exclaimed.  “This is no moment for joking:  pack up your trunks and be off as quick as you can!”

Don Luis, who sat quietly smoking in an easy chair, answered: 

“Which will you have, Mazeroux?  A cigar or a cigarette?”

Mazeroux at once grew indignant.

“But look here, Chief, don’t you read the papers?”

“Worse luck!”

“In that case, the situation must appear as clear to you as it does to me and everybody else.  During the last three days, since the double suicide, or, rather, the double murder of Marie Fauville and her cousin Gaston Sauverand, there hasn’t been a newspaper but has said this kind of thing:  ’And, now that M. Fauville, his son, his wife, and his cousin Gaston Sauverand are dead, there’s nothing standing between Don Luis Perenna and the Mornington inheritance!’

“Do you understand what that means?  Of course, people speak of the explosion on the Boulevard Suchet and of Fauville’s posthumous revelations; and they are disgusted with that dirty brute of a Fauville; and they don’t know how to praise your cleverness enough.  But there is one fact that forms the main subject of every conversation and every discussion.

“Now that the three branches of the Roussel family are extinct, who remains?  Don Luis Perenna.  In default of the natural heirs, who inherits the property?  Don Luis Perenna.”

“Lucky dog!”

“That’s what people are saying, Chief.  They say that this series of murders and atrocities cannot be the effort of chance coincidences, but, on the contrary, points to the existence of an all-powerful will which began with the murder of Cosmo Mornington and ended with the capture of the hundred millions.  And to give a name to that will, they pitch on the nearest, that of the extraordinary, glorious, ill-famed, bewildering, mysterious, omnipotent, and ubiquitous person who was Cosmo Mornington’s intimate friend and who, from the beginning, has controlled events and pieced them together, accusing and acquitting people, getting them arrested, and helping them to escape.

“They say,” he went on hurriedly, “that he manages the whole business and that, if he works it in accordance with his interests, there are a hundred millions waiting for him at the finish.  And this person is Don Luis Perenna, in other words, Arsene Lupin, the man with the unsavoury reputation whom it would be madness not to think of in connection with so colossal a job.”

“Thank you!”

“That’s what they say, Chief; I’m only telling you.  As long as Mme. Fauville and Gaston Sauverand were alive, people did not give much thought to your claims as residuary legatee.  But both of them died.  Then, you see, people can’t help remarking the really surprising persistence with which luck looks after Don Luis Perenna’s interests.  You know the legal maxim:  fecit cui prodest.  Who benefits by the disappearance of all the Roussel heirs?  Don Luis Perenna.”