Perenna in fact had jumped into a taxicab and driven home as fast as he could.  He got out in the square, ran through the gateway, crossed the courtyard, and went down the passage that led to Mlle. Levasseur’s quarters.  He leaped up the steps, knocked, and entered without waiting for an answer.

The door of the room that served as a sitting-room was opened and Florence appeared.  He pushed her back into the room, and said, in a tone furious with indignation: 

“It’s done.  The accident has occurred.  And yet none of the old servants can have prepared it, because they were not there and because I was out with the car this afternoon.  Therefore, it must have been late in the day between six and nine o’clock, that somebody went to the garage and filed the steering-rod three quarters through.”

“I don’t understand.  I don’t understand,” she said, with a scared look.

“You understand perfectly well that the accomplice of the ruffians cannot be one of the new servants, and you understand perfectly well that the job was bound to succeed and that it did succeed, beyond their hopes.  There is a victim, who suffers instead of myself.”

“But tell me what has happened, Monsieur!  You frighten me!  What accident?  What was it?”

“The motor car was overturned.  The chauffeur is dead.”

“Oh,” she said, “how horrible!  And you think that I can have—­Oh, dead, how horrible!  Poor man!”

Her voice grew fainter.  She was standing opposite to Perenna, close up against him.  Pale and swooning, she closed her eyes, staggered.

He caught her in his arms as she fell.  She tried to release herself, but had not the strength; and he laid her in a chair, while she moaned, repeatedly: 

“Poor man!  Poor man!”

Keeping one of his arms under the girl’s head, he took a handkerchief in the other hand and wiped her forehead, which was wet with perspiration, and her pallid cheeks, down which the tears streamed.

She must have lost consciousness entirely, for she surrendered herself to Perenna’s cares without the least resistance.  And he, making no further movement, began anxiously to examine the mouth before his eyes, the mouth with the lips usually so red, now bloodless and discoloured.

Gently passing one of his fingers over each of them, with a continuous pressure, he separated them, as one separates the petals of a flower; and the two rows of teeth appeared.

They were charming, beautifully shaped, and beautifully white; a little smaller perhaps than Mme. Fauville’s, perhaps also arranged in a wider curve.  But what did he know?  Who could say that their bite would not leave the same imprint?  It was an improbable supposition, an impossible miracle, he knew.  And yet the circumstances were all against the girl and pointed to her as the most daring, cruel, implacable, and terrible of criminals.

Her breathing became regular.  He perceived the cool fragrance of her mouth, intoxicating as the scent of a rose.  In spite of himself, he bent down, came so close, so close that he was seized with giddiness and had to make a great effort to lay the girl’s head on the back of the chair and to take his eyes from the fair face with the half-parted lips.