“She dined as usual, but less than usual, eating almost nothing; then she received a visit from one of her friends, who remained only a few minutes, before starting on a voyage.”

This was what he dreaded:  Madame Dammauville might have told this friend.  If this were so, his crime would be of no use to him; where would it carry him?

After a few moments, and in a tone that he tried to render indifferent, he asked the name of this friend.

“A friend of her youth, Madame Thezard, living at No. 9, in the Rue des Capucines, the wife of a consul.”

Until he reached the house in the Rue Sainte-Anne he repeated this name and address to himself, which he could not write down, and which he must not forget, for it was from there now that the danger would come if Madame Dammauville had spoken.

For a long time he had been habituated to the sight of death, but when he found himself in the presence of this woman stretched on her bed as if she slept, a shiver seized him.

“Give me a mirror and a candle,” he said to the maid and the cook who stood at the door, not daring to enter.

While they went in search of these things he walked over to the stove; the draught remained as he had turned it on the previous evening; he opened it and returned to the bed.

His examination was not long; she had succumbed to asphyxiation caused by the gas from the charcoal.  Did it proceed from the construction of the stove, or from a defect in the chimney?  The inquest would decide this; as for him, he could only prove the death.

On leaving him the evening before, Phillis, uneasy, told him that she would come early in the morning to know what Madame Dammauville wished.  When he told her she was dead she was prostrated with despair; in that case Florentin was lost.  He tried to reassure her, but without success.

Nougarede, also, was in despair, and regretted that he had not proceeded otherwise.  And he tried to reassure Phillis; the prosecution rested on the button and the struggle that had torn it off.  Saniel would destroy this hypothesis; he counted on him.

Saniel became, then, as he had been before the intervention of Madame Dammauville, the only hope of Phillis and her mother, and to encourage them he exaggerated the influence that his testimony would have.

“When I shall have demonstrated that there was no struggle, the hypothesis of the torn button will crumble by itself.”

“And if it is sustained, how and with what shall we overthrow it?”

If he had appeared as usual, she would have shared the confidence with which he tried to inspire her; but since the death of Madame Dammauville he was so changed, that she could not help being uneasy.  Evidently it was Madame Dammauville’s death that made him so gloomy and irritable that he would submit to no opposition.  He saw the dangers of the situation that this death created for Florentin, and with his usual generosity he reproached himself for not having consented to take care of her sooner; he would have saved her, certainly, as he had begun by demanding the removal of the stove, and Florentin would have been saved also.