If Madame Dammauville had not released the lampshade, she would have seen Saniel turned pale and his lips quiver.

“Mais voila!” continued Balzajette.  “He made this sacrifice to his new functions; the student has disappeared before the professor.”

He might have continued along time.  Neither Madame Dammauville nor Saniel listened to him; but, thinking of his dinner, he was not going to launch into a discourse that at any other moment he would not have failed to undertake.  He rose to go.

As Saniel bowed, Madame Dammauville stopped him with a movement of her hand.

“Did you not know this unfortunate who was assassinated opposite?” she asked, pointing to the windows.

So serious as was an acknowledgment, Saniel could not answer in the negative.

“I was called in to prove his death,” he said.

And he took several steps toward the door, but she stopped him again.

“Had you business with him?” she asked.

“I saw him several times.”

Balzajette cut short this conversation, which was idle talk to him.

“Good evening, dear Madame.  I will see you tomorrow, but not in the morning, for I go to the country at six o’clock, and shall not return until noon.”

CHAPTER XXXIII

SUSPENSE

“Did you observe how I cut the conversation short?” Balzajette said, as they went down-stairs.  “If you listen to women they will never let you go.  I cannot imagine why she spoke to you of this assassinated man, can you?”

“No.”

“I believe that this assassination has affected her brain to a certain point.  In any case, it has given her a horror of this house.”

He continued thus without Saniel listening to what he said.  On reaching the Rue Neuve-des-Petits-Champs, Balzajette hailed a passing cab.

“You have had the kindness not to delay me,” he said, pressing the hand of his young ‘confrere’, “but I feel that I must hurry.  ’Au revoir’.”

A good riddance!  This babbling gave Saniel the vertigo.

He must recover himself, look the situation in the face, and consider that which might, which must, happen.

The situation was plain; Madame Dammauville’s cry revealed it.  When the lamplight struck him full in the face, she found in him the man whom she had seen draw Caffies curtains.  If, in her amazement, she at first refused to believe it, her questions regarding Caffie, and Balzajette’s explanations about his hair and beard, destroyed her hesitation and replaced doubt by the horror of certainty.  He was the assassin; she knew it, she had seen him.  And such as she revealed herself to him, it seemed that she was not the woman to challenge the testimony of her eyes, and to let the strength of her memory be shaken by simple denials, supported by Balzajette’s words.

With a vivid clearness he saw to the bottom of the abyss open before him; but what he did not see was in what way she would push him into this giddy whirlpool, that is, to whom she would reveal the discovery that she had made.  To Phillis, to Balzajette, or to the judge?