"Blood!" echoed the alarmed students.
"She's alive," said the inspector, more to himself than to his dumfounded auditors,—"alive, probably, else whoever brought her here would have kept her here."
He returned abruptly to the other room, and depositing the lamp, turned to Lerouge,—
"Were you expecting anybody else here to-night, monsieur?"
"Why, yes; Jean Marot——"
The possibility flashed upon the three young men at once, but it seemed too preposterous. The inspector had turned to the window and blown a shrill whistle.
"Pardon me, young gentlemen, but I'll not disturb you any longer than I can help. What is Jean Marot's address? Good! I will leave you company. You will not mind? Dubat will entertain you. It is better than resting in the station-house, eh?"
With this pleasantry Inspector Loup hurried away, snatched a cab, and was driven rapidly to the address in the Faubourg St. Honoré.
Jean Marot was the son of a rich silk manufacturer of Lyon, and therefore lived in more comfortable quarters than most students, in a fashionable neighborhood on the right bank of the Seine. He had reached his lodgings scarcely three-quarters of an hour before Inspector Loup. But in that time he had stampeded the venerable concierge, got his still unconscious burden to bed and fetched a surgeon. The concierge had protested against turning the house into a hospital for vagrant women; but Jean was of an impetuous nature, and wilful besides, and when he was told that the last vacant chamber had been taken that day, he boldly carried the girl to his own rooms and placed her in his own bed. And when the concierge had reported this fact to Madame Goutran, that excellent lady, who had officiated as Jean's landlady for the past four years, shrugged her shoulders in such an equivocal way that the concierge concluded that her best interests lay in assisting the young man as much as possible.