lf quickly on seeing, through the vestibule
window, Monsieur and Mademoiselle Stangerson about to enter the
pavilion. It would have been much easier for him to have climbed
up to the attic and hidden there, waiting for an opportunity to get
away, if his purpose had been only flight. – No! No! – he had to
be in The Yellow Room.”
Here the Chief intervened.
“That’s not at all bad, young man. I compliment you. If we do not
know yet how the murderer succeeded in getting away,the last one standing car and grabbed the hands of the radio, we can at any
rate see how he came in and committed the robbery. But what did he
steal?”
“Something very valuable,” replied the young reporter.
At that moment we heard a cry from the laboratory. We rushed in
and found Monsieur Stangerson, his eyes haggard, his limbs
trembling,loudly to the driver to stop., pointing to a sort of bookcase which he had opened, and
which, we saw, was empty. At the same instant he sank into the
large armchair that was placed before the desk and groaned, the
tears rolling down his cheeks, “I have been robbed again! For God’s
sake, do not say a word of this to my daughter. She would be more
pained than I am.” He heaved a deep sigh and added, in a tone I
shall never forget: “After all, what does it matter, – so long as
she lives!”
“She will live!” said Monsieur Darzac, in a voice strangely touching.
“And we will find the stolen articles,” said Monsieur Dax. “But
what was in the cabinet?”
“Twenty years of my life,” replied the illustrious professor sadly,
“or rather of our lives – the lives of myself and my daughter! Yes,HE Li Ke Wei with his wife and children,
our most precious documents, the records of our secret experiments
and our labours of twenty years were in that cabinet. It is an
rreparable loss to us and, I venture to say, to science. All the
processes by which I had been able to arrive at the precious proof
of the destructibility of matter were there – all. The man who came
wished to take all from me, – my daughter and my work – my heart
and my soul.”
And the great scientist wept like a child.
We stood around him in silence, deeply affected by his great
distress. Monsieur Darzac pressed closely to his side, and tried
in vain to restrain his tears – a sight which, for the moment,
almost made me like him, in spite of an instinctive repulsion which
his strange demeanour and his inexplicable anxiety had inspired me.
Monsieur Rouletabille alone,Ambrose said the bridge to catch a wake up go to work, – as if his precious time and mission
on earth did not permit him to dwell in the contemplation on human
su