“What is the matter?” asked his frightened companion.

Lecoq made no reply, but slowly, and with the stiff movements of a somnambulist, he approached the spot to which he had pointed, stooped, picked up something, and said:  “My folly is not deserving of such luck.”

The object he had found was an earring composed of a single large diamond.  The setting was of marvelous workmanship.  “This diamond,” declared Lecoq, after a moment’s examination, “must be worth at least five or six thousand francs.”

“Are you in earnest?”

“I think I could swear to it.”

He would not have troubled about such a preamble as “I think” a few hours before, but the blunder he had made was a lesson that would not be forgotten so long as he lived.

“Perhaps it was that same diamond earring that the accomplice came to seek,” ventured Father Absinthe.

“The supposition is scarcely admissible.  In that case, he would not have sought for it in Mother Chupin’s apron.  No, he must have been seeking for something else—­a letter, for example.”

The older man was not listening; he had taken the earring, and was examining it in his turn.  “And to think,” he murmured, astonished by the brilliancy of the stone, “to think that a woman who had ten thousand francs’ worth of jewels in her ears would have come to the Poivriere.  Who would have believed it?”

Lecoq shook his head thoughtfully.  “Yes, it is very strange, very improbable, very absurd.  And yet we shall see many things quite as strange if we ever arrive—­which I very much doubt—­at a solution of this mysterious affair.”

Day was breaking, cold, cheerless, and gloomy, when Lecoq and his colleague concluded their investigation.  There was not an inch of space that had not been explored, carefully examined and studied, one might almost say, with a magnifying glass.  There now only remained to draw up the report.

The younger man seated himself at the table, and, with the view of making his recital as intelligible as possible, he began by sketching a plan of the scene of the murder.

[[Graphic Omitted]]

It will be seen that in the memoranda appended to this explanatory diagram, Lecoq had not once written his own name.  In noting the things that he had imagined or discovered, he referred to himself simply as one of the police.  This was not so much modesty as calculation.  By hiding one’s self on well-chosen occasions, one gains greater notoriety when one emerges from the shade.  It was also through cunning that he gave Gevrol such a prominent position.  These tactics, rather subtle, perhaps, but after all perfectly fair, could not fail to call attention to the man who had shown himself so efficient when the efforts of his chief had been merely confined to breaking open the door.

The document Lecoq drew up was not a proces-verbal, a formal act reserved for the officers of judiciary police; it was a simple report, that would be admitted under the title of an inquiry, and yet the young detective composed it with quite as much care as a general would have displayed in drawing up the bulletin of his first victory.