After some agreeable conversation I was glad to observe that he preferred silence, and was satisfied with the _rôle_ of listener, as I and Monsieur Carmaignac chatted; and he seated himself, with extraordinary caution and indecision, upon a bench, beside us, and seemed very soon to find a difficulty in keeping his eyes open. "I heard you mention," said the French gentleman, "that you had engaged an apartment in the Dragon Volant, about half a league from this. When I was in a different police department, about four years ago, two very strange cases were connected with that house. One was of a wealthy _émigré_, permitted to return to France by the Em--by Napoleon. He vanished. The other--equally strange--was the case of a Russian of rank and wealth. He disappeared just as mysteriously." "My servant," I said, "gave me a confused account of some occurrences, and, as well as I recollect, he described the same persons--I mean a returned French nobleman and a Russian gentleman. But he made the whole story so marvelous--I mean in the supernatural sense--that, I confess, I did not believe a word of it." "No, there was nothing supernatural; but a great deal inexplicable," said the French gentleman. "Of course, there may be theories; but the thing was never explained, nor, so far as I know, was a ray of light ever thrown upon it." "Pray let me hear the story," I said. "I think I have a claim, as it affects my quarters. You don't suspect the people of the house?" "Oh! it has changed hands since then. But there seemed to be a fatality about a particular room." "Could you describe that room?" "Certainly. It is a spacious, paneled bedroom, up one pair of stairs, in the back of the house, and at the extreme right, as you look from its windows." "Ho! Really? Why, then, I have got the very room!" I said, beginning to be more interested--perhaps the least bit in the world, disagreeably. "Did the people die, or were they actually spirited away?" "No, they did not die--they disappeared very oddly. I'll tell you the particulars--I happen to know them exactly, because I made an official visit, on the first occasion, to the house, to collect evidence; and although I did not go down there, upon the second, the papers came before me, and I dictated the official letter dispatched to the relations of the people who had disappeared; they had applied to the government to investigate the affair. We had letters from the same relations more than two years later, from which we learned that the missing men had never turned up." He took a pinch of snuff, and looked steadily at me.