little door on the right which opened into the concierge's rooms. In
half a minute one of them came out and said: "Gagged and bound, and
his wife too."

"But the rooms which were to be plundered are upstairs," said the
Duke--"the big drawing-rooms on the first floor. Come on; we may be
just in time. The scoundrels may not yet have got away."

He ran quickly up the stairs, followed by the inspector, and hurried
along the corridor to the door of the big drawing-room. He threw it
open, and stopped dead on the threshold. He had arrived too late.

The room was in disorder. Chairs were overturned, there were empty
spaces on the wall where the finest pictures of the millionaire had
been hung. The window facing the door was wide open. The shutters
were broken; one of them was hanging crookedly from only its bottom
hinge. The top of a ladder rose above the window-sill, and beside
it, astraddle the sill, was an Empire card-table, half inside the
room, half out. On the hearth-rug, before a large tapestry fire-
screen, which masked the wide fireplace, built in imitation of the
big, wide fireplaces of our ancestors, and rose to the level of the
chimney-piece-a magnificent chimney-piece in carved oak-were some
chairs tied together ready to be removed.

The Duke and the inspector ran to the window, and looked down into
the garden. It was empty. At the further end of it, on the other
side of its wall, rose the scaffolding of a house a-building. The
burglars had found every convenience to their hand-a strong ladder,
an egress through the door in the garden wall, and then through the
gap formed by the house in Process of erection, which had rendered