any special trace, neither the
mark of the nails nor the imprint of the fingers. Quite right. It is
little Louise Roque, sure enough!"

He delicately replaced the handkerchief:

"There's nothing for me to do--She's been dead for the last hour at
least. We must give notice of the matter to the authorities."

Renardet, standing up, with his hands behind his back, kept staring with
a stony look at the little body exposed to view on the grass. He
murmured:

"What a wretch! We must find the clothes."

The doctor felt the hands, the arms, the legs. He said:

"She must have been bathing, no doubt. They ought to be at the water's
edge."

The Mayor thereupon gave directions:

"Do you, Princepe" (this was his secretary), "go and look for those
clothes for me along the river. Do you, Maxime" (this was the steward),
"hurry on towards Roug-le-Tors, and bring on here to me the examining
magistrate with the gendarmes. They must be here within an hour. You
understand."

The two men quickly departed, and Renardet said to the doctor:

"What miscreant has been able to do such a deed in this part of the
country."

The doctor murmured:

"Who knows? Everyone is capable of that? Everyone in particular and
nobody in general. No matter, it must be some prowler, some workman out
of employment. As we live under a Republic, we must expect to meet only
this kind of person along the roads."

Both of them were Bonapartists.

The Mayor went on:

"Yes, it can only be a stranger, a passer-by, a vagabond without heart
or home."

The doctor added with the shadow of a smile on his face:

"And without a wife. Having neither a good supper nor a good bed, he
procured the rest for himself. You can't tell how many men there may be
in the world capable of a crime at a given moment. Did you know that
this little girl had disappeared?"

And with the end of his stick he touched one after the other the
stiffened fingers of the corpse, resting on them as on the keys of a
piano.

"Yes, the mother came last night to look for me about nine o'clock, the
child not having come home from supper up to seven. We went to try and
find her along the roads up to midnight, but we did not think of the
wood. However, we needed daylight to carry out a search with a practical
result."

"Will you have a cigar?" said the doctor.

"Thanks, I don't care to smoke. It gives me a turn to look at this."

They both remained standing in front of this corpse of a y