M. Verduret did not finish his report until four o’clock in the morning; then he cried, with an accent of triumph: 

“And now they are on their guard, and sharp, wary rascals too:  but they won’t escape me; I have cornered them beautifully.  Before a week is over, Prosper, you will be publicly exonerated, and will come out of this scrape with flying colors.  I have promised your father you shall.”

“Impossible!” said Prosper in a dazed way, “it cannot be!”

“What?”

“All this you have just told me.”

M. Verduret opened wide his eyes, as if he could not understand anyone having the audacity to doubt the accuracy of his report.

“Impossible, indeed!” he cried.  “What! have you not sense enough to see the plain truth written all over every fact, and attested by the best authority?  Your thick-headedness exasperates me to the last degree.”

“But how can such rascalities take place in Paris, in our very midst, without——­”

“Parbleu!” interrupted the fat man, “you are young, my friend!  Are you innocent enough to suppose that crimes, forty times worse than this, don’t occur every day?  You think the horrors of the police-court are the only ones.  Pooh!  You only read in the Gazette des Tribunaux of the cruel melodramas of life, where the actors are as cowardly as the knife, and as treacherous as the poison they use.  It is at the family fireside, often under shelter of the law itself, that the real tragedies of life are acted; in modern crimes the traitors wear gloves, and cloak themselves with public position; the victims die, smiling to the last, without revealing the torture they have endured to the end.  Why, what I have just related to you is an everyday occurrence; and you profess astonishment.”

“I can’t help wondering how you discovered all this tissue of crime.”

“Ah, that is the point!” said the fat man with a self-satisfied smile.  “When I undertake a task, I devote my whole attention to it.  Now, make a note of this:  When a man of ordinary intelligence concentrates his thoughts and energies upon the attainment of an object, he is certain to obtain ultimate success.  Besides that, I have my own method of working up a case.”

“Still I don’t see what grounds you had to go upon.”

“To be sure, one needs some light to guide one in a dark affair like this.  But the fire in Clameran’s eye at the mention of Gaston’s name ignited my lantern.  From that moment I walked straight to the solution of the mystery, as I would walk to a beacon-light on a dark night.”

The eager, questioning look of Prosper showed that he would like to know the secret of his protector’s wonderful penetration, and at the same time be more thoroughly convinced that what he had heard was all true—­that his innocence would be more clearly proved.

“Now confess,” cried M. Verduret, “you would give anything in the world to find out how I discovered the truth?”