ay at head-quarters. My first job was to lay hands
upon Mademoiselle Jeanne, and I very soon found her, as I expected,
turned into a man again, and living in the most disreputable company. I
made any number of enquiries, and when I went to the Saint-Anthony's Pig
last evening I knew that it was some unknown person who had been buried
in your stead; that Paul was Mademoiselle Jeanne; and that Mademoiselle
Jeanne was Charles Rambert. It was my intention to arrest you, and to
ascertain definitely by means of the dynamometer that you were innocent
of the Langrune and the Danidoff crimes."

"What you tell me about the dynamometer explains how you know I am not
the man who committed the robbery at the hotel, but what clears me in
your eyes of the Langrune murder?"

"Bless my soul!" Juve retorted, "you are arguing as if you wanted to
prove you were guilty. Well, my boy, it's the same story as the other.
The man who murdered the Marquise de Langrune smashed things, and the
dynamometer has proved that you are not strong enough to have been the
man."

"And suppose I had been mad at the time," Charles Rambert said, his
hesitation and his tone betraying his anxiety about the answer, "could I
have been strong enough then? Might I have committed these crimes
without knowing anything about it?"

But Juve shook his head.

"I know: you are referring to your mother, and are haunted by an idea
that through some hereditary taint you might be a somnambulist and have
done these things in your sleep. Come, Charles Rambert, finish your
breakfast and put all that out of your head. To begin with, you would
not have been strong enough, even then; and in the next place there is
nothing at present to show that you are mad, nor even that your poor
mother---- But I need not go on: I've got some rather odd notions on
that subject."

"Then, M. Juve----"

"Drop the 'monsieur'; call me 'Juve.'"

"Then, if you know that I am innocent, you can go and tell my father? I
have nothing to fear? I can reappear in my own name?"

Juve looked at the lad with an ironical smile.

"How you go ahead!" he exclaimed. "Please understand that although I do
believe you are innocent, I am almost certainly the only person who
does. And unfortunately I have not yet got any evidence that would be
sufficiently convincing and certain to put the persuasion of your guilt
out of your father's head, or anybody else's. This is not the time for
you to reappear: it would si