“No one must enter the garden,” said he; and, to ensure obedience, he placed the two gendarmes on sentry before the entrance, and advanced towards the house, accompanied by the corporal and the locksmith.

He knocked several times loudly with his leaded cane, first at the door, and then successively at all the window shutters.  After each blow, he placed his ear against the wood and listened.  Hearing nothing, he turned to the locksmith.

“Open!” said he.

The workman unstrapped his satchel, and produced his implements.  He had already introduced a skeleton key into the lock, when a loud exclamation was heard from the crowd outside the gate.

“The key!” they cried.  “Here is the key!”

A boy about twelve years old playing with one of his companions, had seen an enormous key in a ditch by the roadside; he had picked it up and carried it to the cottage in triumph.

“Give it to me youngster,” said the corporal.  “We shall see.”

The key was tried, and it proved to be the key of the house.

The commissary and the locksmith exchanged glances full of sinister misgivings.  “This looks bad,” muttered the corporal.  They entered the house, while the crowd, restrained with difficulty by the gendarmes, stamped with impatience, or leant over the garden wall, stretching their necks eagerly, to see or hear something of what was passing within the cottage.

Those who anticipated the discovery of a crime, were unhappily not deceived.  The commissary was convinced of this as soon as he crossed the threshold.  Everything in the first room pointed with a sad eloquence to the recent presence of a malefactor.  The furniture was knocked about, and a chest of drawers and two large trunks had been forced and broken open.

In the inner room, which served as a sleeping apartment, the disorder was even greater.  It seemed as though some furious hand had taken a fiendish pleasure in upsetting everything.  Near the fireplace, her face buried in the ashes, lay the dead body of Widow Lerouge.  All one side of the face and the hair were burnt; it seemed a miracle that the fire had not caught her clothing.

“Wretches!” exclaimed the corporal.  “Could they not have robbed, without assassinating the poor woman?”

“But where has she been wounded?” inquired the commissary, “I do not see any blood.”

“Look! here between the shoulders,” replied the corporal; “two fierce blows, by my faith.  I’ll wager my stripes she had no time to cry out.”

He stooped over the corpse and touched it.

“She is quite cold,” he continued, “and it seems to me that she is no longer very stiff.  It is at least thirty-six hours since she received her death-blow.”

The commissary began writing, on the corner of a table, a short official report.

“We are not here to talk, but to discover the guilty,” said he to the corporal.  “Let information be at once conveyed to the justice of the peace, and the mayor, and send this letter without delay to the Palais de Justice.  In a couple of hours, an investigating magistrate can be here.  In the meanwhile, I will proceed to make a preliminary inquiry.”