“Oh, horror! the men in black!  They walk up to the bed:  ’Gaston Sauverand, your appeal is rejected.  Courage!  Be a man!’ Oh, the cold, dark morning—­the scaffold!  It’s your turn, Marie, your turn!  Would you survive your lover?  Sauverand is dead:  it’s your turn.  See, here’s a rope for you.  Or would you rather have poison?  Die, will you, you hussy!  Die with your veins on fire—­as I am doing, I who hate you—­hate you—­hate you!”

M. Desmalions ceased, amid the silent astonishment of all those present.  He had great difficulty in reading the concluding lines, the writing having become almost wholly shapeless and illegible.

He said, in a low voice, as he stared at the paper:  “’Hippolyte Fauville,’ The signature is there.  The scoundrel found a last remnant of strength to sign his name clearly.  He feared that a doubt might be entertained of his villainy.  And indeed how could any one have suspected it?”

And, looking at Don Luis, he added: 

“It needed, to solve the mystery, a really exceptional power of insight and gifts to which we must all do homage, to which I do homage.  All the explanations which that madman gave have been anticipated in the most accurate and bewildering fashion.”

Don Luis bowed and, without replying to the praise bestowed upon him, said: 

“You are right, Monsieur le Prefet; he was a madman, and one of the most dangerous kind, the lucid madman who pursues an idea from which nothing will make him turn aside.  He pursued it with superhuman tenacity and with all the resources of his fastidious mind, enslaved by the laws of mechanics.

“Another would have killed his victims frankly and brutally.  He set his wits to work to kill at a long date, like an experimenter who leaves to time the duty of proving the excellence of his invention.  And he succeeded only too well, because the police fell into the trap and because Mme. Fauville is perhaps going to die.”

M. Desmalions made a gesture of decision.  The whole business, in fact, was past history, on which the police proceedings would throw the necessary light.  One fact alone was of importance to the present:  the saving of Marie Fauville’s life.

“It’s true,” he said, “we have not a minute to lose.  Mme. Fauville must be told without delay.  At the same time, I will send for the examining magistrate; and the case against her is sure to be dismissed at once.”

He swiftly gave orders for continuing the investigations and verifying Don Luis’s theories.  Then, turning to Perenna: 

“Come, Monsieur,” he said.  “It is right that Mme. Fauville should thank her rescuer.  Mazeroux, you come, too.”

The meeting was over, that meeting in the course of which Don Luis had given the most striking proofs of his genius.  Waging war, so to speak, upon the powers beyond the grave, he had forced the dead man to reveal his secret.  He disclosed, as though he had been present throughout, the hateful vengeance conceived in the darkness and carried out in the tomb.