She had become whiter than her collar.

“Your father!” she stammered.

“Yes.  For years he has been using the money that was intrusted to him, until the deficit now amounts to twelve millions.”

“Great heavens!”

“And, notwithstanding the enormity of that sum, he was reduced, during the latter months, to the most miserable expedients,—­going from door to door in the neighborhood, soliciting deposits, until he actually basely swindled a poor newspaper-vender out of five hundred francs.”

“Why, this is madness!  And how did you find out?”

“Last night they came to arrest him.  Fortunately we had been notified; and I helped him to escape through a window of my sister’s room, which opens on the yard of an adjoining house.”

“And where is he now?”

“Who knows?”

“Had he any money?”

“Everybody thinks that he carries off millions.  I do not believe it.  He even refused to take the few thousand francs which M. de Thaller had brought him to facilitate his flight.”

Mlle. Lucienne shuddered.

“Did you see M. de Thaller?” she asked.

“He got to the house a few moments in advance of the commissary of police; and a terrible scene took place between him and my father.”

“What was he saying?”

“That my father had ruined him.”

“And your father?”

“He stammered incoherent phrases.  He was like a man who has received a stunning blow.  But we have discovered incredible things.  My father, so austere and so parsimonious at home, led a merry life elsewhere, spending money without stint.  It was for a woman that he robbed.”

“And—­do you know who that woman is?”

“No.  But I can find out from the writer of the article in this paper, who says that he knows her.  See!”

Mlle. Lucienne took the paper which Maxence was holding out to her:  but she hardly condescended to look at it.

“But what’s your idea now?”

“I do not believe that my father is innocent; but I believe that there are people more guilty than he,—­skillful and prudent knaves, who have made use of him as a man of straw,—­villains who will quietly digest their share of the millions (the biggest one, of course), while he will be sent to prison.”

A fugitive blush colored Mlle. Lucienne’s cheeks.

“That being the case,” she interrupted, “what do you expect to do?”

“Avenge my father, if possible, and discover his accomplices, if he has any.”

She held out her hand to him.

“That’s right,” she said.  “But how will you go about it?”

“I don’t know yet.  At any rate, I must first of all run to the newspaper office, and get that woman’s address.”

But Mlle. Lucienne stopped him.

“No,” she uttered:  “it isn’t there that you must go.  You must come with me to see my friend the commissary.”