And she at once went on, insistently: 

“I, a right to the inheritance?  I have none at all, Monsieur le Prefet, none at all.  I never knew Mr. Mornington.  What is this story?  There is some mistake.”

She spoke with great animation and with an apparent frankness that would have impressed any other man than the Prefect of Police.  But how could he forget Don Luis’s arguments and the accusation made beforehand against the person who would arrive at the meeting?

“Give me the papers,” he said.

She took from her handbag a blue envelope which was not fastened down and which he found to contain a number of faded documents, damaged at the folds and torn in different places.

He examined them amid perfect silence, read them through, studied them thoroughly, inspected the signatures and the seals through a magnifying glass, and said: 

“They bear every sign of being genuine.  The seals are official.”

“Then, Monsieur le Prefet—?” said Florence, in a trembling voice.

“Then, Mademoiselle, let me tell you that your ignorance strikes me as most incredible.”

And, turning to the solicitor, he said: 

“Listen briefly to what these documents contain and prove.  Gaston Sauverand, Cosmo Mornington’s heir in the fourth line, had, as you know, an elder brother, called Raoul, who lived in the Argentine Republic.  This brother, before his death, sent to Europe, in the charge of an old nurse, a child of five who was none other than his daughter, a natural but legally recognized daughter whom he had had by Mlle. Levasseur, a French teacher at Buenos Ayres.

“Here is the birth certificate.  Here is the signed declaration written entirely in the father’s hand.  Here is the affidavit signed by the old nurse.  Here are the depositions of three friends, merchants or solicitors at Buenos Ayres.  And here are the death certificates of the father and mother.

“All these documents have been legalized and bear the seals of the French consulate.  For the present, I have no reason to doubt them; and I am bound to look upon Florence Levasseur as Raoul Sauverand’s daughter and Gaston Sauverand’s niece.”

“Gaston Sauvarand’s niece? ...  His niece?” stammered Florence.

The mention of a father whom she had, so to speak, never known, left her unmoved.  But she began to weep at the recollection of Gaston Sauverand, whom she loved so fondly and to whom she found herself linked by such a close relationship.

Were her tears sincere?  Or were they the tears of an actress able to play her part down to the slightest details?  Were those facts really revealed to her for the first time?  Or was she acting the emotions which the revelation of those facts would produce in her under natural conditions?

Don Luis observed M. Desmalions even more narrowly than he did the girl, and tried to read the secret thoughts of the man with whom the decision lay.  And suddenly he became certain that Florence’s arrest was a matter resolved upon as definitely as the arrest of the most monstrous criminal.  Then he went up to her and said: