“If you really wish to do so, monsieur! Indeed, it would be the best thing to do.”

Thomery hailed a cab. He and the diamond agent entered it together, and she gave the driver an address.

Twenty minutes later they left the cab and were standing before the house where the present possessor of the pearls was to be found. Thomery knew no more now about the person he had come to interview than he did when he started: that is to say, nothing.

The broker had cleverly evaded giving any direct answers to the sugar refiner’s questions: she had confined herself to stating what would be the probable price demanded for the pearl collar – the question that interested Thomery least of all!

They mounted, in single file, a rather poor sort of staircase: on the second floor the woman stopped. A narrow door faced them.... The woman rang.

They waited.

“Someone is coming!” said the woman. “I hear footsteps.”

The door was opened half-way.

“Who is it?” asked a man’s voice.

“I, dear friend,” answered the woman.

The door opened wide: the same voice said:

“Come in, monsieur.”

Thomery had barely stepped inside the room, when the diamond broker, who was close behind, flung a long silk scarf round his neck, and, pushing a knee into the victim’s back for a support, attempted to apply, with violent force, a fatal strangulation; energetic, Thomery did not lose his presence of mind... He knew that to resist such a pull by simple force was impossible... Quickly he threw himself backwards, thus going with the strangling pull and falling on top of the woman, who had played this dastardly trick on him. From his constricted throat came a hoarse “Ah!” like a death rattle.

As he was falling, for one flashing second, it seemed as though he were going to escape from the vice which was crushing in his throat... then, out of the shadow, there had appeared the phantasmic vision of a man in a tight-fitting sort of black bodysuit, which covered him from head to foot... His face was concealed by a black hooded mask, in which burned two satanic eyes.

This figure had leapt out of the shadow.

He held a dagger in his hand.

Before Thomery had time to make a movement, the masked demon had pierced his chest with a single thrust.

The sugar refiner was nothing but a twitching, bloody corpse by the time his bulky frame smashed into the floorboards.

“Ah, well!” declared the so-called broker, who had got to her feet and was kicking Thomery’s body aside. “Ah, well, he is a dead weight this fellow! By Jupiter, master, I fancied he was going to crush me, and that I should have to let him free!... You did well to come to the rescue!” The hooded assassin remarked, in an indifferent tone: “It really does not matter in the slightest! Tell me, does anyone suspect?”