“He ought not therefore to be astonished if that gentleman, taking advantage of such gross carelessness, decides to preserve a precious anonymity, to reject the rôle of witness and base informer, to take a hand in this strange affair, and to defend energetically, with the help of the papers in the wallet, the memory of the unfortunate Constance Bakersfield and the honor of the Bakersfields, and to concentrate all his energy on punishing the unknown with green eyes, without permitting any one else to touch a single one of her fair hairs or to demand a reckoning for the blood which stained her adorable hands.” By way of signature Ralph sketched the head of a man in spectacles with a cigarette between his lips and wrote beneath it: “Could you oblige me with a light?” The Commissary snored. Ralph set his note-book back on his knee, then drew a little bottle from his pocket, uncorked it, and held it under Marescal’s nose. A strong scent of chloroform filled the carriage. The head of Marescal drooped lower and lower. Then, very gently, Ralph opened his overcoat, drew from its pocket the belt and wallet, and fastened the belt round his own waist, under his waistcoat. He had scarcely done this when a train, moving very slowly, came past, a freight train. He opened the door of the car, sprang lightly and without being seen on to the buffers of a truck full of apples, and installed himself comfortably under the tarpaulin that covered them. “A dead girl crook and a murderess of whom I have a horror, such are the worthy persons to whom I afford my protection,” he said to himself. “Why, in the devil’s name, have I plunged into this adventure?” CHAPTER IV THE VILLA B. IS BURGLED “If there is one principle to which I always cling,” said Arsène Lupin to me, when, many years later, he told me the story of the girl with the green eyes, “it is never to attempt the solution of a problem before the proper hour for doing so has arrived. To get to the bottom of certain enigmas, you must wait till luck, or your own cleverness, has brought you a sufficient number of the actual facts. You must only advance along the road to the truth, with the greatest care, step by step, following the course of events.” This reasoning applies to such an affair as this, in which there was nothing but contradictions, absurdities, isolated acts, apparently linked to one another by no connection of any kind; without a scrap of unity in it; without a directing thought; every one playing a lone hand. Never had Ralph felt so strongly how deeply he ought to distrust any kind of precipitousness in any adventure of this kind. Deductions, intuitions, analyses, explorations were just so many snares you must be careful not to fall into.