dge are there too,
and the doors are guarded."

"This death has made a stir very quickly," remarked Jacques Collin.

"Ay, and Paccard and Europe have vanished; I am afraid they may have
scared away the seven hundred and fifty thousand francs," said Asie.

"The low villains!" said Collin. "They have done for us by their
swindling game."

Human justice, and Paris justice, that is to say, the most suspicious,
keenest, cleverest, and omniscient type of justice--too clever, indeed,
for it insists on interpreting the law at every turn--was at last on the
point of laying its hand on the agents of this horrible intrigue.

The Baron of Nucingen, on recognizing the evidence of poison, and
failing to find his seven hundred and fifty thousand francs, imagined
that one of two persons whom he greatly disliked--either Paccard or
Europe--was guilty of the crime. In his first impulse of rage he flew to
the prefecture of police. This was a stroke of a bell that called up all
Corentin's men. The officials of the prefecture, the legal profession,
the chief of the police, the justice of the peace, the examining
judge,--all were astir. By nine in the evening three medical men were
called in to perform an autopsy on poor Esther, and inquiries were set
on foot.

_Trompe-la-Mort_, warned by Asie, exclaimed:

"No one knows that I am here; I may take an airing." He pulled himself
up by the skylight of his garret, and with marvelous agility was
standing in an instant on the roof, whence he surveyed the surroundings
with the coolness of a tiler.

"Good!" said he, discerning a garden five houses off in the Rue de
Provence, "that will just do for me."

"You are paid out, _Trompe-la-Mort_," said Contenson, suddenly emerging
from behind a stack of chimneys. "You may explain to Monsieur Camusot
what mass you were performing on the roof, Monsieur l'Abbe, and, above
all, why you were escaping----"

"I have enemies in Spain," said Carlos Herrera.

"We can go there by way of your attic," said Contenson.

The sham Spaniard pretended to yield; but, having set his back and feet
across the opening of the skylight, he gripped Contenson and flung
him off with such violence that the spy fell in the gutter of the Rue
Saint-Georges.

Contenson was dead on his field of honor; Jacques Collin quietly dropped
into the room again and went to bed.

"Give me something that will make me very sick without killing me,"
said he to Asie; "for I must be at deat