eyes when one of them proved to be a notorious forger for whom the police had been looking for some months, and who had all the time been hidden under their very noses! Buckhurst began to feel a growing respect for the amazing French girl, who had beaten his smartest detectives on their own ground. But, unfortunately, none of the hunchbacks was the man they wanted, and at last they began to suspect that Fedoroff’s information was at fault.

Then came a dramatic surprise. One of Yvette’s small assistants, a sharp little Polish Jew boy, came to her with a strange story. He had been wandering about the night before and had seen a hunchbacked man let himself out of the side door of a big building half-way between Greek Street and War dour Street. The man had walked a considerable distance in a northerly direction into a part of London the boy did not know at all, and had entered an unoccupied house, stayed a few minutes, and come out again. The lad had shadowed him all the way, and had followed him homewards, until he again entered the building in Soho.

Dick, Jules, and Yvette turned out at once. The boy pointed out the building to them. It was a tall structure which dominated all the others in the vicinity. It was apparently a big shop with storerooms above. On the facia over the windows was the name “Marcel Deloitte, Antique Furniture.” There was nothing to indicate that it differed in the slightest degree from dozens of other shops and buildings in the neighbourhood. Yet Dick felt suspicious.

“We can do nothing till I get the Mohawk handy,” said Dick. “I will bring her down to-night.”

And he paused.

“I wish you would keep out of this, Yvette,” he went on wistfully. “It is going to be very dangerous, I am convinced.” The French girl was growing very dear to him, and he shuddered at the idea of her being mixed up in the coming struggle with a desperado of Barakoff’s type.

But Yvette shook her head.

“I’m in this to the finish, Dick,” was all she said in her pretty broken English, and Dick knew he could not move her. But he was full of fear.

That afternoon another explosion of the pale-violet vapour occurred in North London not far from Finsbury Park Station. Dick rushed to the spot with the boy who had followed the hunchbacked man, and the lad recognised the place without hesitation. The house destroyed was, he was confident, the one the hunchback had entered the night 

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