Before all, whatever the consequences of their inactivity at this moment when the circle of the police was closing in around them, before all it was necessary that one should speak and the other listen.

“We are coming,” said Sauverand, in his grave voice, “we are coming to the most important events, to those of which the interpretation, which is new to you, but strictly true, will make you believe in our good faith.  Ill luck having brought me across Hippolyte Fauville’s path in the course of one of my walks in the Bois, I took the precaution of changing my abode and went to live in the little house on the Boulevard Richard-Wallace, where Florence came to see me several times.

“I was even careful to keep her visits a secret and, moreover, to refrain from corresponding with her except through the poste restante.  I was therefore quite easy in my mind.

“I worked in perfect solitude and in complete security.  I expected nothing.  No danger, no possibility of danger, threatened us.  And, I may say, to use a commonplace but very accurate expression, that what happened came as an absolute bolt from the blue.  I heard at the same time, when the Prefect of Police and his men broke into my house and proceeded to arrest me, I heard at the same time and for the first time of the murder of Hippolyte Fauville, the murder of Edmond, and the arrest of my adored Marie.”

“Impossible!” cried Don Luis, in a renewed tone of aggressive wrath.  “Impossible!  Those facts were a fortnight old.  I cannot allow that you had not heard of them.”

“Through whom?”

“Through the papers,” exclaimed Don Luis.  “And, more certainly still, through Mlle. Levasseur.”

“Through the papers?” said Sauverand.  “I never used to read them.  What!  Is that incredible?  Are we under an obligation, an inevitable necessity, to waste half an hour a day in skimming through the futilities of politics and the piffle of the news columns?  Is your imagination incapable of conceiving a man who reads nothing but reviews and scientific publications?

“The fact is rare, I admit,” he continued.  “But the rarity of a fact is no proof against it.  On the other hand, on the very morning of the crime I had written to Florence saying that I was going away for three weeks and bidding her good-bye.  I changed my mind at the last moment; but this she did not know; and, thinking that I had gone, not knowing where I was, she was unable to inform me of the crime, of Marie’s arrest, or, later, when an accusation was brought against the man with the ebony walking-stick, of the search that was being made for me.”

“Exactly!” declared Don Luis.  “You cannot pretend that the man with the ebony walking-stick, the man who followed Inspector Verot to the Cafe du Pont-Neuf and purloined his letter—­”

“I am not the man,” Sauverand interrupted.

And, when Don Luis shrugged his shoulders, he insisted, in a more forcible tone of voice: