“Come, don’t blame yourself too much,” said he.  “We would have found Natacha without you; Gounsovski notified us that she was going to embark in the Bay of Lachtka this evening with Priemkof.”

“Natacha with Priemkof!” exclaimed Rouletabille.  “Natacha with the man who introduced the two living bombs into her father’s house!  If she is with him, Excellency, it is because she is his prisoner, and that alone will be sufficient to prove her innocence.  I thank the Heaven that has sent you here.”

Koupriane swallowed a glass of vodka, poured another after it, and finally deigned to translate his thought: 

“Natacha is the friend of these precious men and we will see them disembark hand in hand.”

“Your men, then, haven’t studied the traces of the struggle that ‘these precious men’ have had on the banks of the Neva before they carried away Natacha?”

“Oh, they haven’t been hoodwinked.  As a matter of fact, the struggle was quite too visible not to have been done for appearances’ sake.  What a child you are!  Can’t you see that Natacha’s presence in the datcha had become quite too dangerous for that charming young girl after the poisoning of her father and step-mother failed and at the moment when her comrades were preparing to send General Trebassof a pleasant little gift of dynamite?  She arranged to get away and yet to appear kidnapped.  It is too simple.”

Rouletabille raised his head.

“There is something simpler still to imagine than the culpability of Natacha.  It is that Priemkof schemed to pour the poison into the flask of vodka, saying to himself that if the poison didn’t succeed at least it would make the occasion for introducing his dynamite into the house in the pockets of the ‘doctors’ that they would go to find.”

Koupriane seized Rouletabille’s wrist and threw some terrible words at him, looking into the depths of his eyes: 

“It was not Priemkof who poured the poison, because there was no poison in the flask.”

Rouletabille, as he heard this extraordinary declaration, rose, more startled than he had ever been in the course of this startling campaign.

If there was no poison in the flask, the poison must have been poured directly into the glasses by a person who was in the kiosk!  Now, there were only four persons in the kiosk:  the two who were poisoned and Natacha and himself, Rouletabille.  And that kiosk was so perfectly isolated that it was impossible for any other persons than the four who were there to pour poison upon the table.

“But it is not possible!” he cried.

“It is so possible that it is so.  Pere Alexis dedared that there is no poison in the flask, and I ought to tell you that an analysis I had made after his bears him out.  There was no poison, either, in the small bottle you took to Pere Alexis and into which you yourself had poured the contents of Natacha’s glass and yours; no trace of poison excepting in two of the four glasses, arsenate of soda was found only on the soiled napkins of Trebassof and his wife and in the two glasses they drank from.”