seething within him for the last two hours. "Blast! Shall I never have
finished with this confounded business?"

In fact, an incredible ill-luck seemed to dog his footsteps, compelling
him to grope about at random, without permitting him to use the elements
of success which his own persistency or the very force of things placed
within his grasp. Gilbert gave him the crystal stopper. Gilbert sent
him a letter. And both had disappeared at that very moment.

And it was not, as he had until then believed, a series of fortuitous
and independent circumstances. No, it was manifestly the effect of an
adverse will pursuing a definite object with prodigious ability and
incredible boldness, attacking him, Lupin, in the recesses of his safest
retreats and baffling him with blows so severe and so unexpected that
he did not even know against whom he had to defend himself. Never, in
the course of his adventures, had he encountered such obstacles as now.

And, little by little, deep down within himself, there grew a haunting
dread of the future. A date loomed before his eyes, the terrible date
which he unconsciously assigned to the law to perform its work of
vengeance, the date upon which, in the light of a wan April morning,
two men would mount the scaffold, two men who had stood by him, two
comrades whom he had been unable to save from paying the awful penalty...



CHAPTER III

THE HOME LIFE OF ALEXIS DAUBRECQ