these were mere guesses after all.  Perhaps that house stood in some remote quarter of the city where my footsteps never went again—­perhaps in some neighboring street or piazza, where I passed it every day!  At all events, the whole thing vanished like a dream, and, but for the ring and the hundred scudi, a dream I should by this time believe it to have been.  The scudi, I am sorry to say, were spent within a month—­the ring I have never parted from, and here it is.”

Hereupon the student took from his finger a superb ruby set between two brilliants of inferior size, and allowed it to pass from hand to hand, all round the table.  Exclamations of surprise and admiration, accompanied by all sorts of conjectures and comments, broke from every lip.

“The dead man was the lady’s lover,” said one.  “That is why she wanted his portrait.”

“Of course, and her husband had murdered him,” said another.

“Who, then, was the man in black?” asked a third.

“A servant, to be sure.  She said, if you remember, that he was faithful; but not devoted to her interests alone.  That meant that he would obey to the extent of procuring for her the portrait of her lover; but that he did not choose to betray his master, even though his master was a murderer.”

“But if so, where was the master?” said the first speaker.  “Is it likely that he would have neglected to conceal the body during all these hours?”

“Certainly.  Nothing more likely, if he were a man of the world, and knew how to play his game out boldly to the end.  Have we not been told that it was the last night of the Carnival, and what better could he do, to avert suspicion, than show himself at as many balls as he could visit in the course of the evening?  But really, this ring is magnificent!”

“Superb.  The ruby alone must be worth a thousand francs.”

“To say nothing of the diamonds, and the setting,” observed the next to whom it was handed.

At length, after having gone nearly the round of the table, the ring came to a little dark, sagacious-looking man, just one seat beyond Dalrymple’s, who peered at it suspiciously on every side, breathed upon it, rubbed it bright again upon his coat-sleeve, and, finally, held the stones up sideways between his eyes and the light.

“Bah!” said he, sending it on with a contemptuous fillip of the forefinger and thumb.  “Glass and paste, mon ami.  Not worth five francs of anybody’s money.”

Mueller, who had been eyeing him all the time with an odd smile lurking about the corners of his mouth, emptied his last drop of Chablis, turned the glass over on the table, bottom upwards, and said very coolly:—­

“Well, I’m sorry for that; because I gave seven francs for it myself this morning, in the Palais Royal.”

“You!”

“Seven francs!”

“Bought in the Palais Royal!”

“What does he mean?”