me 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 gene