“We do not know. None of us have seen it. Old Bob is strangely modest. He would not even permit his coat to be taken off in our presence; and the coat hid the wound so well that we should never have suspected it was there if Walter had not come to tell us, frightened at the sight of the blood.” As soon as we came to the château, we encountered Mme. Edith, who appeared to have been watching for us. “My uncle won’t have me near him,” she said, regarding Rouletabille with an air of anxiety different from anything I had ever noticed in her before. “It’s incomprehensible!” “Ah, Madame,” replied the reporter, making a low bow to his hostess. “I assure you that nothing in the world is incomprehensible, when one is willing to take a little trouble to understand it.” And he offered her his congratulations upon having had her uncle restored to her at the moment when she was ready to despair of ever seeing him again. Mme. Edith seemed about to inquire into the purport of the enigmatical words at the beginning of my friend’s remarks when we were joined by Prince Galitch. He had come to ask for news of his old friend, Bob, of whose misfortune he had learned. Mme. Edith reassured him as to her uncle’s condition and entreated the Prince to pardon her relative for his too excessive devotion to the “oldest skulls in the history of humanity.” The Prince smiled graciously and with the utmost kindliness when he was told that Old Bob had been attempting to steal his skull. “You will find your skull,” Mrs. Rance told him, “in the bottom of the cave in the grotto where it rolled down with him. Your collection will be unimpaired, Prince.” The Prince asked for the details. He seemed very curious about the affair. And Mme. Edith told how her uncle had acknowledged to her that he had quitted the Fort of Hercules by way of the air shaft which communicated with the sea. As soon as she said this, I recalled the experience of Rouletabille with the flask of water and also the close iron bars, and the falsehoods which Old Bob had uttered assumed gigantic proportions in my mind, and I was sure that the rest of the party must hold the same opinion as myself. Mme. Edith told us that Tullio had been waiting with his boat at the opening of the gallery abutting on the shaft, to row the old savant to the bank in front of the Grotto of Romeo and Juliet. “Why so many twists and turnings when it was so simple to go out by the gate?” I could not restrain myself from exclaiming. Mme. Edith looked at me reproachfully and I regretted having even seemed to have taken part against her in any way.