“What is that?” asked the doctor.

Groener had evidently decided to make the best of the situation for he answered at once:  “The grand opera house.”

“Good!  Now another!  What is that?”

“The Bastille column.”

“Right!  And this?”

“The Champs Elysees.”

“And this?”

“Notre-Dame church.”

So far the beats had come uniformly about one in a second, for the man’s pulse was slow; at each beat the liquid in the tube shot up six inches and then dropped six inches, but, at the view of Notre-Dame, the column rose only three inches, then dropped back and shot up seven inches.

The doctor nodded gravely while Coquenil, with breathless interest, with a, morbid fascination, watched the beating of this red column.  It was like the beating of red blood.

“And this?”

As the picture changed there was a quiver in the pulsating column, a hesitation with a quick fluttering at the bottom of the stroke, then the red line shot up full nine inches.

M. Paul glanced at the sheet and saw a perfect reproduction of private room Number Six in the Ansonia.  Everything was there as on the night of the crime, the delicate yellow hangings, the sofa, the table set for two.  And, slowly, as they looked, two holes appeared in the wall.  Then a dim shape took form upon the floor, more and more distinctly until the dissolving lens brought a man’s body into clear view, a body stretched face downward in a dark red pool that grew and widened, slowly straining and wetting the polished wood.

“Groener,” said the magistrate, his voice strangely formidable in the shadows, “do you recognize this room?”

“No,” said the prisoner impassively, but the column was pulsing wildly.

“You have been in this room?”

“Never.”

“Nor looked through these eyeholes?”

“No.”

“Nor seen that man lying on the floor?”

“No.”

Now the prisoner’s heart was beating evenly again, somehow he had regained his self-possession.

“You are lying, Groener,” accused the judge.  “You remember this man perfectly.  Come, we will lift him from the floor and look him in the face, full in the face.  There!” He signaled the lantern operator and there leaped forth on the sheet the head of Martinez, the murdered, mutilated head with shattered eye and painted cheeks and the greenish death pallor showing underneath.  A ghastly, leering cadaver in collar and necktie, dressed up and photographed at the morgue, and now flashed hideously at the prisoner out of the darkness.  Yet Groener’s heart pulsed on steadily with only a slight quickening, with less quickening than Coquenil felt in his own heart.

“Who is it?” demanded the judge.

“I don’t know,” declared the accused.

Again the picture changed.

“Who is this?”

“Napoleon Bonaparte.”