The inspector of police then commenced his labours. He telephoned (no one had thought of the telephone) for assistance and asked the Central Bureau to watch the railway station, the port, and the stage coaches. He acquired the names and addresses of _tout le monde_. He made catalogues of articles. He locked all the servants in the ping-pong-room. He took down narratives, beginning with Cecil’s. And while the functionary was engaged with Mrs. Macalister, Cecil quietly but firmly disappeared. After his departure, the affair loomed larger and larger in mere magnitude, but nothing that came to light altered its leading characteristics. A wholesale robbery had been planned with the most minute care and knowledge, and executed with the most daring skill. Some ten persons--the manager and his wife, a chambermaid, six waiters, and the concierge--seemed to have been concerned in the enterprise, excluding Mrs. Macalister’s Arab and no doubt other assistants. (The guests suddenly remembered how superior the concierge and the waiters had been to the ordinary concierge and waiter!) At a quarter-past five o’clock the police had ascertained that a hundred rooms had been entered, and horrified guests were still descending! The occupants of many rooms, however, made no response to a summons to awake. These, it was discovered afterwards, had either, like Cecil, received a sedative unawares, or they had been neatly gagged and bound. In the result, the list of missing valuables comprised nearly two hundred watches, eight hundred rings, a hundred and fifty other articles of jewellery, several thousand pounds’ worth of furs, three thousand pounds in coin, and twenty-one thousand pounds in bank-notes and other forms of currency. One lady, a doctor’s wife, said she had been robbed of eight hundred pounds in Bank of England notes, but her story obtained little credit; other tales of enormous loss, chiefly by women, were also taken with salt. When the dawn began, at about six o’clock, an official examination of the façade of the hotel indicated that nearly every room had been invaded by the balconied window, either from the roof or from the ground. But the stone flags of the terrace, and the beautifully asphalted pathways of the garden disclosed no trace of the plunderers. “I guess your British habit of sleeping with the window open don’t cut much ice to-day, anyhow!” said an American from Indianapolis to the company. That morning no omnibus from the hotel arrived at the station to catch the six-thirty train which takes two days to ramble to Tunis and to Biskra. And all the liveried porters talked together in excited Swiss-German. IV. “My compliments to Captain Black,” said Cecil Thorold, “and repeat to him that all I want him to do is to keep her in sight. He needn’t overhaul her too much.” “Precisely, sir.” Lecky bowed; he was pale. “And you had better lie down.”