"Is that you, Weber? Already? Well done! You are a model servant! Break down the gate, old chap, and come up here; delighted to see you!"
In a few minutes, he searched his prisoner's clothes, got hold of his pocket-book, cleared the papers out of the drawers of the desk and the davenport, flung them on the table and went through them.
He gave a shout of joy: the bundle of letters was there, the famous bundle of letters which he had promised to restore to the Emperor.
He put back the papers in their place and went to the window:
"It's all finished, Weber! You can come in! You will find Mr. Kesselbach's murderer in his bed, all ready tied up. . . . Good-bye, Weber!"
And Lupin, tearing down the stairs, ran to the coach-house and went back to Dolores Kesselbach, while Weber was breaking into the villa.
Single-handed, he had arrested Altenheim's seven companions!
And he had delivered to justice the mysterious leader of the gang, the infamous monster, Louis de Malreich!
A young man sat writing at a table on a wide wooden balcony.
From time to time, he raised his head and cast a vague glance toward the horizon of hills, where the trees, stripped by the autumn, were shedding their last leaves over the red roofs of the villas and the lawns of the gardens. Then he went on writing.