“Well?”
Clarisse rose from her seat, with a passionate movement of her whole being, leant over Lupin and said, in a hollow voice:
“There was nothing in that piece of crystal, nothing, do you understand? No paper, no hiding-place! The whole expedition to Enghien was futile! The murder of Léonard was useless! The arrest of my son was useless! All my efforts were useless!”
“But why? Why?”
“Why? Because what you stole from Daubrecq was not the stopper made by his instructions, but the stopper which was sent to John Howard, the Stourbridge glassworker, to serve as a model.”
If Lupin had not been in the presence of so deep a grief, he could not have refrained from one of those satirical outbursts with which the mischievous tricks of fate are wont to inspire him. As it was, he muttered between his teeth:
“How stupid! And still more stupid as Daubrecq had been given the warning.”
“No,” she said. “I went to Enghien on the same day. In all that business Daubrecq saw and sees nothing but an ordinary burglary, an annexation of his treasures. The fact that you took part in it put him off the scent.”
“Still, the disappearance of the stopper....”
“To begin with, the thing can have had but a secondary importance for him, as it is only the model.”