Here we had a very extraordinary interruption.

Holmes raised his hand for silence. Then he strode across the room, flung open the door, and dragged in a great gaunt woman whom he had seized by the shoulder. She entered with ungainly struggle like some huge awkward chicken, torn, squawking, out of its coop.

“Leave me alone! What are you a-doin’ of?” she screeched.

“Why, Susan, what is this?”

“Well, ma’am, I was comin’ in to ask if the visitors was stayin’ for lunch when this man jumped out at me.”

“I have been listening to her for the last five minutes, but did not wish to interrupt your most interesting narrative. Just a little wheezy, Susan, are you not? You breathe too heavily for that kind of work.”

Susan turned a sulky but amazed face upon her captor. “Who be you, anyhow, and what right have you a-pullin’ me about like this?”

“It was merely that I wished to ask a question in your presence. Did you, Mrs. Maberley, mention to anyone that you were going to write to me and consult me?”

“No, Mr. Holmes, I did not.”

“Who posted your letter?”

“Susan did.”

“Exactly. Now, Susan, to whom was it that you wrote or sent a message to say that your mistress was asking advice from me?”

“It’s a lie. I sent no message.”

“Now, Susan, wheezy people may may not live long, you know. It’s a wicked thing to tell fibs. Whom did you tell?”

“Susan!” cried her mistress, “I believe you are a bad, treacherous woman. I remember now that I saw you speaking to someone over the hedge.”

“That was my own business,” said the woman sullenly.

“Suppose I tell you that it was Barney Stockdale to whom you spoke?” said Holmes.

“Well, if you know, what do you want to ask for?”

“I was not sure, but I know now. Well now, Susan, it will be worth ten pounds to you if you will tell me who is at the back of Barney.”

“Someone that could lay down a thousand pounds for every ten you have in the world.”

“So, a rich man? No; you smiled — a rich woman. Now we have got so far, you may as well give the name and earn the tenner.”

“I’ll see you in hell first.”

“Oh, Susan! Language!”

“I am clearing out of here. I’ve had enough of you all. I‘ll send for my box to-morrow.” She flounced for the door.

“Good-bye, Susan. Paregoric is the stuff.... Now,” he continued, turning suddenly from lively to severe when the door had closed behind the flushed and angry woman, “this gang means business. Look how close they play the game. Your letter to me had the 10 P.M. postmark. And yet Susan passes the word to Barney. Barney has time to go to his employer and get instructions; he or she — I incline to the latter from Susan’s grin when she thought I had blundered — forms a plan. Black Steve is called in, and I am warned off by eleven o’clock next morning. That‘s quick work, you know.”

"Gilbert's calmness is even more impressive, especially when we remember how he broke down at the trial. He retains an unshaken confidence in the omnipotence of Arsene Lupin:

"`The governor shouted to me before everybody not to be afraid, that he was there, that he answered for everything. Well, I'm not afraid. I shall rely on him until the last day, until the last minute, at the very foot of the scaffold. I know the governor! There's no danger with him. He has promised and he will keep his word. If my head were off, he'd come and clap it on my shoulders and firmly! Arsene Lupin allow his chum Gilbert to die? Not he! Excuse my humour!'

"There is a certain touching frankness in all this enthusiasm which is not without a dignity of its own. We shall see if Arsene Lupin deserves the confidence so blindly placed in him."

Lupin was hardly able to finish reading the article for the tears that dimmed his eyes: tears of affection, tears of pity, tears of distress.

No, he did not deserve the confidence of his chum Gilbert. Certainly, he had performed impossibilities; but there are circumstances in which we must perform more than impossibilities, in which we must show ourselves stronger than fate; and, this time, fate had been stronger than he. Ever since the first day and throughout this lamentable adventure, events had gone contrary to his anticipations, contrary to logic itself. Clarisse and he, though pursuing an identical aim, had wasted weeks in fighting each other. Then, at the moment when they were uniting their efforts, a series of ghastly disasters had come one after the other: the kidnapping of little Jacques, Daubrecq's disappearance, his imprisonment in the Lovers' Tower, Lupin's wound, his enforced inactivity, followed by the cunning manceuvres that dragged Clarisse - and Lupin after her - to the south, to Italy. And then, as a crowning catastrophe, when, after prodigies of will-power, after miracles of perseverance, they were entitled to think that the Golden Fleece was won, it all caine to nothing. The list of the Twenty-seven had no more value than the most insignificant scrap of paper.

"The game's up!" said Lupin. "It's an absolute defeat. What if I do revenge myself on Daubrecq, ruin him and destroy him? He is the real victor, once Gilbert is going to die.

He wept anew, not with spite or rage, but with despair. Gilbert was going to die! The lad whom he called his chum, the best of his pals would be gone for ever, in a few hours. He could not save him. He was at the end of his tether. He did not even look round for a last expedient. What was the use?

And his persuasion of his own helplessness was so deep, so definite that he felt no shock of any kind on receiving a telegram from the Masher that said:

"Motor accident. Essential part broken. Long repair. Arrive to-morrow morning."

It was a last proof to show that fate had uttered its decree. He no longer thought of rebelling against the decision.

He looked at Clarisse. She was peacefully sleeping; and this total oblivion, this absence of all consciousness, seemed to him so enviable that, suddenly yielding to a fit of cowardice, he seized the bottle, still half-filled with the sleeping-draught, and drank it down.