LITMIR.BIZ

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reached this decision, the first step to be taken was to put his followers on the wrong scent.

      He walked rapidly up the Rue Sebastopol, and, reaching the square of the Arts et Metiers, he abruptly stopped, and asked some insignificant questions of two constables who were standing talking together.

      The manoeuvre had the result he expected; Raoul and Clameran stood perfectly still about twenty steps off, not daring to advance.

      Twenty steps! That was as much start as the clown wanted. While talking with the constables, he had pulled the bell of the door before which they were standing, and its hollow sound apprised him that the door was open. He bowed, and entered the house.

      A minute later the constables had passed on, and Lagors and Clameran in their turn rang the bell. When the concierge appeared, they asked who it was that had just gone in disguised as a clown.

      They were told that no such person had entered, and that none of the lodgers had gone out disguised that night. “However,” added the concierge, “I am not very sure, for this house has a back door which opens on the Rue St. Denis.”

      “We are tricked,” interrupted Lagors, “and will never know who the clown is.”

      “Unless we learn it too soon for our own good,” said Clameran musingly.

      While Lagors and Clameran were anxiously trying to devise some means of discovering the clown’s identity, Verduret hurried up the back street, and reached the Archangel as the clock struck three.

      Prosper, who was watching from his window, saw him in the distance, and ran down to open the door for him.

      “What have you learned?” he said; “what did you find out? Did you see Madeleine? Were Raoul and Clameran at the ball?”

      But M. Verduret was not in the habit of discussing private affairs where he might be overheard.

      “First of all, let us go into your room, and get some water to wash this cut, which burns like fire.”

      “Heavens! Are you wounded?”

      “Yes, it is a little souvenir of your friend Raoul. Ah, I will soon teach him the danger of chopping up a man’s arm!”

      Prosper was surprised at the look of merciless rage on his friend’s face, as he calmly washed and dressed his arm.

      “Now, Prosper, we will talk as much as you please. Our enemies are on the alert, and we must crush them instantly, or not at all. I have made a mistake. I have been on the wrong track; it is an accident liable to happen to any man, no matter how intelligent he may be. I took the effect for the cause. The day I was convinced that culpable relations existed between Raoul and Mme. Fauvel, I thought I held the end of the thread that must lead us to the truth. I should have been more mistrustful; this solution was too simple, too natural.”

      “Do you suppose Mme. Fauvel to be innocent?”

      “Certainly not. But her guilt is not such as I first supposed. I imagined that, infatuated with a seductive young adventurer, Mme. Fauvel had first bestowed upon him the name of one of her relatives, and then introduced him as her nephew. This was an adroit stratagem to gain him admission to her husband’s house.

      “She began by giving him all the money she could could dispose of; later she let him take her jewels to the pawnbrokers; when she had nothing more to give, she allowed him to steal the money from her husband’s safe. That is what I first thought.”

      “And in this way everything was explained?”

      “No, this did not explain everything, as I well knew at the time, and should, consequently, have studied my characters more thoroughly. How is Clameran’s position to be accounted for, if my first idea was the correct one?”

      “Clameran is Lagors’s accomplice of course.”

      “Ah, there is the mistake! I for a long time believed Lagors to be the principal person, when, in fact, he is not. Yesterday, in a dispute between them, the forge-master said to his dear friend, ‘And, above all things, my friend, I would advise you not to resist me, for if you do I will crush you to atoms.’ That explains all. The elegant Lagors is not the lover of Mme. Fauvel, but the tool of Clameran. Besides, did our first suppositions account for the resigned obedience of Madeleine? It is Clameran, and not Lagors, whom Madeleine obeys.”

      Prosper began to remonstrate.

      M. Verduret shrugged his shoulders. To convince Prosper he had only to utter one word: to tell him that three hours ago Clameran had announced his intended marriage with Madeleine; but he did not.

      “Clameran,” he continued, “Clameran alone has Mme. Fauvel in his power. Now, the question is, what is the secret of this terrible influence he has gained over her? I have positive proof that they have not met since their early youth until fifteen months ago; and, as Mme. Fauvel’s reputation has always been above the reach of slander, we must seek in the past for the cause of her resigned obedience to his will.”

      “We can never discover it,” said Prosper mournfully.

      “We can discover it as soon as we know Clameran’s past life. Ah, to-night he turned as white as a sheet when I mentioned his brother Gaston’s name. And then I remembered that Gaston died suddenly, while his brother Louis was making a visit.”

      “Do you think he was murdered?”

      “I think the men who tried to assassinate me would do anything. The robbery, my friend, has now become a secondary detail. It is quite easily explained, and, if that were all to be accounted for, I would say to you, My task is done, let us go ask the judge of instruction for a warrant of arrest.”

      Prosper started up with sparkling eyes.

      “Ah, you know—is it possible?”

      “Yes, I know who gave the key, and I know who told the secret word.”

      “The key might have been M. Fauvel’s. But the word——”

      “The word you were foolish enough to give. You have forgotten, I suppose. But fortunately Gypsy remembered. You know that, two days before the robbery, you took Lagors and two other friends to sup with Mme. Gypsy? Nina was sad, and reproached you for not being more devoted to her.”

      “Yes, I remember that.”

      “But do you remember what you replied to her?”

      “No, I do not,” said Prosper after thinking a moment.

      “Well, I will tell you: ‘Nina, you are unjust in reproaching me with not thinking constantly of you; for at this very moment your dear name guards M. Fauvel’s safe.’”

      The truth suddenly burst upon Prosper like a thunderclap. He wrung his hands despairingly, and cried:

      “Yes, oh, yes! I remember now.”

      “Then you can easily understand the rest. One of the scoundrels went to Mme. Fauvel, and compelled her to give up her husband’s key; then, at a venture, placed the movable buttons on the name of Gypsy, opened the safe, and took the three hundred and fifty thousand francs. And Mme. Fauvel must have been terribly frightened before she yielded. The day after the robbery the poor woman was near dying; and it was she who at the greatest risk sent you the ten thousand francs.”

      “But which was the thief, Raoul or Clameran? What enables them to thus tyrannize over Mme. Fauvel? And how does Madeleine come to be mixed up in the affair?”

      “These questions, my dear Prosper, I cannot yet answer; therefore I postpone seeing the judge. I only ask you to wait ten days; and, if I cannot in that time discover the solution of this mystery, I will return and go with you to report to M. Patrigent all that we know.”

      “Are you going to leave the city?”

      “In an hour I shall be on the road to Beaucaire. It was from that neighborhood that Clameran came, as well as Mme. Fauvel, who was a Mlle. de la Verberie before marriage.”

      “Yes,

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