LITMIR.BIZ

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who handed him a thick letter, and said:

      “This letter was left this morning for M. Bertomy; I was so flustered when he came that I forgot to hand it to him. It is a very odd-looking letter; is it not, monsieur?”

      It was indeed a most peculiar missive. The address was not written, but formed of printed letters, carefully cut from a book, and pasted on the envelope.

      “Oh, ho! what is this?” cried M. Verduret; then turning toward the porter he cried, “Wait.”

      He went into the next room, and closed the door behind him; there he found Prosper, anxious to know what was going on.

      “Here is a letter for you,” said M. Verduret.

      He at once tore open the envelope.

      Some bank-notes dropped out; he counted them; there were ten.

      Prosper’s face turned purple.

      “What does this mean?” he asked.

      “We will read the letter and find out,” replied M. Verduret.

      The letter, like the address, was composed of printed words cut out and pasted on a sheet of paper.

      It was short but explicit:

      “MY DEAR PROSPER—A friend, who knows the horror of your situation, sends you this succor. There is one heart, be assured, that shares your sufferings. Go away; leave France; you are young; the future is before you. Go, and may this money bring you happiness!”

      As M. Verduret read the note, Prosper’s rage increased. He was angry and perplexed, for he could not explain the rapidly succeeding events which were so calculated to mystify his already confused brain.

      “Everybody wishes me to go away,” he cried; “then there must be a conspiracy against me.”

      M. Verduret smiled with satisfaction.

      “At last you begin to open your eyes, you begin to understand. Yes, there are people who hate you because of the wrong they have done you; there are people to whom your presence in Paris is a constant danger, and who will not feel safe till they are rid of you.”

      “But who are these people, monsieur? Tell me, who dares send this money?”

      “If I knew, my dear Prosper, my task would be at an end, for then I would know who committed the robbery. But we will continue our searches. I have finally procured evidence which will sooner or later become convincing proof. I have heretofore only made deductions more or less probable; I now possess knowledge which proves that I was not mistaken. I walked in darkness: now I have a light to guide me.”

      As Prosper listened to M. Verduret’s reassuring words, he felt hope arising in his breast.

      “Now,” said M. Verduret, “we must take advantage of this evidence, gained by the imprudence of our enemies, without delay. We will begin with the porter.”

      He opened the door and called out:

      “I say, my good man, step here a moment.”

      The porter entered, looking very much surprised at the authority exercised over his lodger by this stranger.

      “Who gave you this letter?” said M. Verduret.

      “A messenger, who said he was paid for bringing it.”

      “Do you know him?”

      “I know him well; he is the errand-runner who keeps his cart at the corner of the Rue Pigalle.”

      “Go and bring him here.”

      After the porter had gone, M. Verduret drew from his pocket his diary, and compared a page of it with the notes which he had spread over the table.

      “These notes were not sent by the thief,” he said, after an attentive examination of them.

      “Do you think so, monsieur?”

      “I am certain of it; that is, unless the thief is endowed with extraordinary penetration and forethought. One thing is certain: these ten thousand francs are not part of the three hundred and fifty thousand which were stolen from the safe.”

      “Yet,” said Prosper, who could not account for this certainty on the part of his protector, “yet——”

      “There is no doubt about it: I have the numbers of all the stolen notes.”

      “What! When even I did not have them?”

      “But the bank did, fortunately. When we undertake an affair we must anticipate everything, and forget nothing. It is a poor excuse for a man to say, ‘I did not think of it’ when he commits some oversight. I thought of the bank.”

      If, in the beginning, Prosper had felt some repugnance about confiding in his father’s friend, the feeling had now disappeared.

      He understood that alone, scarcely master of himself, governed only by the inspirations of inexperience, never would he have the patient perspicacity of this singular man.

      Verduret continued talking to himself, as if he had absolutely forgotten Prosper’s presence:

      “Then, as this package did not come from the thief, it can only come from the other person, who was near the safe at the time of the robbery, but could not prevent it, and now feels remorse. The probability of two persons assisting at the robbery, a probability suggested by the scratch, is now converted into undeniable certainty. Ergo, I was right.”

      Prosper listening attentively tried hard to comprehend this monologue, which he dared not interrupt.

      “Let us seek,” went on the fat man, “this second person, whose conscience pricks him, and yet who dares not reveal anything.”

      He read the letter over several times, scanning the sentences, and weighing every word.

      “Evidently this letter was composed by a woman,” he finally said. “Never would one man doing another man a service, and sending him money, use the word ‘succor.’ A man would have said, loan, money, or some other equivalent, but succor, never. No one but a woman, ignorant of masculine susceptibilities, would have naturally made use of this word to express the idea it represents. As to the sentence, ‘There is one heart,’ and so on, it could only have been written by a woman.”

      “You are mistaken, monsieur,” said Prosper: “no woman is mixed up in this affair.”

      M. Verduret paid no attention to this interruption, perhaps he did not hear it; perhaps he did not care to argue the matter.

      “Now, let us see if we can discover whence the printed words were taken to compose this letter.”

      He approached the window, and began to study the pasted words with all the scrupulous attention which an antiquarian would devote to an old, half-effaced manuscript.

      “Small type,” he said, “very slender and clear; the paper is thin and glossy. Consequently, these words have not been cut from a newspaper, magazine, or even a novel. I have seen type like this, I recognize it at once; Didot often uses it, so does Mme. de Tours.”

      He stopped with his mouth open, and eyes fixed, appealing laboriously to his memory.

      Suddenly he struck his forehead exultantly.

      “Now I have it!” he cried; “now I have it! Why did I not see it at once? These words have all been cut from a prayer-book. We will look, at least, and then we shall be certain.”

      He moistened one of the words pasted on the paper with his tongue, and, when it was sufficiently softened, he detached it with a pin. On the other side of this word was printed a Latin word, Deus.

      “Ah, ha,” he said with a little laugh of satisfaction. “I knew it. Father Taberet would be pleased to see this. But what has become of the mutilated prayer-book? Can it have been burned? No, because a heavy-bound book is not easily burned. It is thrown in some corner.”

      M.

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