Clenching her fists, and summoning all her strength to prevent herself from swooning, Sonia Danidoff led the man to the anteroom door. Slowly she unlocked the door and held it open, and the man stepped quietly through. The next second he was gone!
Leaping back into her bedroom Sonia Danidoff set every bell a-ringing; with great presence of mind she telephoned down to the hall porter: "Don't let anybody go out! I have been robbed!" and she pressed hard upon the special button that set the great alarm bell clanging. Footsteps and voices resounded in the corridor: the Princess knew that help was coming and ran to open her door. The night watchman, and the manager of the third floor came running up and waiters appeared in numbers at the end of the corridor.
"Stop him! Stop him!" the Princess shouted. "He has only just gone out: a man in a dinner jacket, with a great black beard!"
"Where are you going? What is the matter?" enquired the hall porter, whose lodge was at the far end of the hall, next to the courtyard of the hotel, the door into which he had just closed.
"I don't know," he answered. "There is a thief in the hotel! They are calling from the other side."
"It's not in your set, then? By the way, what floor are you on?"
"All right," said the hall porter, "it's the third floor that they are calling from. Go up and see what is wrong."
The lad turned on his heel, and disregarding the notice forbidding servants to use the passenger lift, hurried back into it and upstairs again. He was a stoutly built fellow, with a smooth face and red hair. On the third floor he stopped, immediately opposite Sonia Danidoff's suite. The Princess was standing at her door, taking no notice of the watchman Muller's efforts to soothe her excitement, and mechanically twisting between her fingers the blank visiting card which her strange visitor had left in place of her pocket-book and the hundred and twenty thousand francs. There was no name whatever on the card.
"Well," said Muller, to the red-headed lad, "where do you come from?"
"I'm the new man on the second floor," the fellow answered. "The hall porter sent me up to find out what was the matter."
"Matter!" said Muller. "Somebody has robbed the Princess. Here, send someone for the police at once."