e come at your call, but I declare that I do not know what to reply
to this strange communication. You believe that you recognize in me the
man who drew the curtains."

"I recognize you."

"Then what do you wish me to say? It is not a consultation that you ask
of me?"

She believed she understood the meaning of this reply and divined its
end.

"The question does not concern me," she said, "neither my moral nor
mental state, but yourself. My eyes, my memory, my conscience, bring a
frightful accusation against you. I cannot believe my eyes or my memory.
I challenge my conscience, and I ask you to reduce this accusation to
nothing."

"And how, Madame?"

"Oh, not by protestations!"

"How can you expect that a man in my position will lower himself to
discuss accusations that rest on an hallucination?"

"Do you believe that I have hallucinations? If you do, call one of your
'confreres' to-morrow in consultation. If he believes as you do, I will
submit; if not, I shall be convinced that I saw clearly, and I shall act
accordingly."

"If you saw clearly, Madame, and I am ready to concede this to you, it
proves that there is some one somewhere who is my double."

"I said this to myself; and it is exactly this idea that made me write to
you. I wished to give you the opportunity of proving that you could not
be this man."

"You will agree that it is difficult for me to admit a discussion on such
an accusation."

"One may find one's self accused by a concourse of fatal circumstances,
and be not less innocent. Witness the unfortunate boy imprisoned for five
months for a crime of which he is not guilty. And I pass from your
innocence as from his, to ask you to prove that the charges against you
are false."

"There are no charges against me."

"There may be; that depends upon yourself. Your hair and beard may have
been cut at the time of the assassination; in that case it is quite
certain that the man I saw was not you, and that I am the victim of an
hallucination. Were they or were they not?"

"They were not; it is only a few days since I had them cut on account of
a contagious disease."

"It may be," she continued, without appearing to be impressed by this
explanation, "that the day of the assassination, at the hour when I saw
you, you were occupied somewhere in such a way that you can prove you
could not have been in the Rue Sainte-Anne, and that I was the victim of
an hallucination. And again, it may be that