“Decidedly so.”

“Yet you will find, Detective Carter, that a clever woman can always fool and foil a clever man.”

“But you, my lady, are very far from being a clever woman,” retorted Nick, with a gesture of impatience, signifying that he wished to leave with her at once.

“Nevertheless, I shall beat you at the finish, make no mistake about that,” cried Cervera, scornfully.  “Now, sir, I will put on my wrap, and go with you where you please.”

With the last remark, she approached a peg in the open closet, as if to take down a dark shawl.

Instead, she suddenly turned quickly around and cried, with a taunting laugh: 

“So long, Detective Carter!  I really feel quite sorry to bid you—­good-by!”

Nick started like a man electrified.

Cervera merely had pressed the peg on which the shawl hung, whereupon the whole back of the closet seemed to fall away instantly, disclosing a lighted passage beyond.

Nick caught a glimpse of it, and of the woman darting toward it, and he followed her like a shot from a gun.

As Cervera passed through the further opening and gained the lighted passage, she seized and threw a short lever just beyond the closet wall.

At the same moment Nick’s weight fell upon the closet floor behind her.

It was like treading upon air.

The lever, like the peg, did not work in an instant.

Nick felt himself falling, and made a desperate clutch at the door jamb—­only to miss it.

Then the closet floor, with the detective upon it, went speeding down like an elevator cut loose from a top story.

CHAPTER XIV.

In A warm corner.

The crash with which Nick Carter vaguely expected his career might be abruptly ended, as the floor upon which he had fallen prostrate rapidly descended, did not come.

The terrific downward speed suddenly decreased, then became more gradual, all in the bare fraction of a second; and then the rushing sound of compressed air escaping through narrow crevices fell upon the detective’s ears.

Nick immediately guessed the truth.

The falling closet floor was that of an elevator, no longer in use as such, yet which still worked on the slides of the elevator well, and evidently had been cleverly adjusted for just such an emergency as that depicted.

Presently there came a heavy jar, and then the downward motion ceased.  The close-fitting floor at first had fallen so swiftly that the confined air in the well beneath it had become so compressed as to form an air cushion, which finally let the floor completely down only after the air had gradually escaped.  It was this escaping air Nick heard during the last moments of his fall.

The entire episode began and ended in but little more than a moment, however.  Though considerably jarred, Nick pulled himself together, and gazed up through the darkness at the bottom of the well.