Three of them actually wrote to the proprietor to tell him what had passed, and to charitably warn him that his _concièrge_ had wholly lost his mind. The proprietor responded to these skeptics, confirming what Bernard had said. Doubt, thereafter, was out of the question. Then began reflections and commentaries. "_Why_ had the proprietor lowered his rents?" "Yes, _why_?" "What motives," said they all, "actuate this strange man? For certainly he must have grave reasons for a step like this! An intelligent man, a man of good sense, would never deprive himself of good fat revenues, well secured, for the simple pleasure of depriving himself. One would not conduct himself thus without being forced, constrained by powerful or terrible circumstances." And each said to himself: "_There is something under all this!_" "But what?" And from the first floor to the sixth they sought and conjectured and delved in their brains. Every lodger had the preoccupied air of a man that strives with all his wits to solve an impossible cipher, and everywhere there began to be a vague disquiet, as it happens when one finds himself in the presence of a sinister mystery. Some one went so far as to hazard: "This man must have committed a great and still hidden crime; remorse pushes him to philanthropy." "It was not a pleasant idea, either, the thought of living thus side by side with a rascal; no, by no means; he might be repentant, and all that, but suppose he yielded to temptation once more!" "The house, perhaps, was badly built?" questioned another, anxiously. "Hum-m, so-so! no one could tell; but all knew one thing--it was very, very old!" "True! and it had been necessary to prop it when they dug the drain last year in the month of March." "Maybe it was the roof, then, and the house is top-heavy?" suggested a tenant on the fifth floor. "Or perhaps," said a lodger in the garret, "there is a press for coining counterfeit money in the cellar; I have often heard at night a sound like the dull, muffled thud of a coin-stamper." The opinion of another was that Russian, maybe Prussian, spies had gained a lodgment in the house, while the gentleman of the first story was inclined to believe that the proprietor purposed to set fire to his house and furniture with the sole object of drawing great sums from the insurance companies. Then began to happen, as they all declared, extraordinary and even frightful things. On the sixth and mansard floors it appeared that strange and absolutely inexplicable noises were heard. Then the nurse of the old lady on the fourth story, going one night to steal wine from the cellar, encountered the ghost of the defunct proprietor--he even held in his hand a receipt for rent--by which she knew him! And the refrain from loft to cellar was: "There is something under all this!"