“Well, yes, sir; I think so.”

The man hesitated; he felt a slight, a very sight, feeling of misgiving.  He looked at Daisy, flushed and smiling, happy and unconcerned, and then at Mrs. Bunting.  She was very pale; but surely her lodger’s sudden seizure was enough to make her feel worried.  Hopkins felt the half-sovereign pleasantly tickling his palm.  The Paris Prefect of Police had given him only half-a-crown —­mean, shabby foreigner!

“Yes, sir; I can let you out that way,” he said at last, “and p’raps when you’re standing out in the air, on the iron balcony, you’ll feel better.  But then, you know, sir, you’ll have to come round to the front if you wants to come in again, for those emergency doors only open outward.”

“Yes, yes,” said Mr. Sleuth hurriedly.  “I quite understand!  If I feel better I’ll come in by the front way, and pay another shilling —­that’s only fair.”

“You needn’t do that if you’ll just explain what happened here.”

The man went and pulled the curtain aside, and put his shoulder against the door.  It burst open, and the light, for a moment, blinded Mr. Sleuth.

He passed his hand over his eyes.  “Thank you,” he muttered, “thank you.  I shall get all right out there.”

An iron stairway led down into a small stable yard, of which the door opened into a side street.

Mr. Sleuth looked round once more; he really did feel very ill—­ ill and dazed.  How pleasant it would be to take a flying leap over the balcony railing and find rest, eternal rest, below.

But no—­he thrust the thought, the temptation, from him.  Again a convulsive look of rage came over his face.  He had remembered his landlady.  How could the woman whom he had treated so generously have betrayed him to his arch-enemy?—­to the official, that is, who had entered into a conspiracy years ago to have him confined—­him, an absolutely sane man with a great avenging work to do in the world—­ in a lunatic asylum.

He stepped out into the open air, and the curtain, falling-to behind him, blotted out the tall, thin figure from the little group of people who had watched him disappear.

Even Daisy felt a little scared.  “He did look bad, didn’t he, now?” she turned appealingly to Mr. Hopkins.

“Yes, that he did, poor gentleman—­your lodger, too?” he looked sympathetically at Mrs. Bunting.

She moistened her lips with her tongue.  “Yes,” she repeated dully, “my lodger.”

CHAPTER XXVII

In vain Mr. Hopkins invited Mrs. Bunting and her pretty stepdaughter to step through into the Chamber of Horrors.  “I think we ought to go straight home,” said Mr. Sleuth’s landlady decidedly.  And Daisy meekly assented.  Somehow the girl felt confused, a little scared by the lodger’s sudden disappearance.  Perhaps this unwonted feeling of hers was induced by the look of stunned surprise and, yes, pain, on her stepmother’s face.