Here fortune favoured them. Apparently the police official, whatever his suspicions were, had meant to make sure of Dick, knowing that Yvette alone could not escape him. A few minutes later they heard her knock, and soon all three were in the house.

“Safe enough now,” said Fédor laconically as he led the way through piles of stored goods to an upper room at the top of the building.

The room was faintly illuminated by a gleam of moonlight which came through a skylight in the roof, and when a small lamp was turned on Dick looked around him with keen interest. Filthily dirty, and apparently unused for years, the room was crammed with a heterogeneous mass of canvas packages and wooden boxes. The only window was covered with shutters through which circular holes had been bored to admit light, but these were covered over with flaps of felt. The dust of years lay thick everywhere.

Dick’s attention was instantly centred on a large, square table in the middle of the room.

Upon the table stood what appeared to be a big camera, its lens pointing to the window, with a screen of ground glass at the back of the camera exposed. A few feet behind, on a tripod, stood a small cinema apparatus with the lens aperture directed at the ground glass plate of the camera. To each ran electric wires from a bracket on the wall of the room. The whole of the electrical apparatus was weird and complicated.

There were also on the table two head telephones connected by wires to the horn of what looked like a large phonograph.

“Now, Mr Manton,” said Fédor in a low, intense voice, “I will show you my new apparatus. Mademoiselle Pasquet knows about it.”

Dick was breathless with excitement. Yvette’s story of Fédor’s wonderful invention had filled him with keenest curiosity.

“If you will look through one of the holes in this shutter,” Fédor went on, “you will see, directly opposite, the window of Mestich’s dining-room. The curtains are drawn, but you will see the room is lighted inside. He and his friends have been there for some time; apparently they have been awaiting Horst.” Dick looked through the hole and saw the lighted window. “Now, come and look at the screen,” urged the Count.

As he spoke he touched an electric switch. Immediately a soft purring noise came from the camera and on the screen there showed a vivid well-focused picture of a room with 

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