ers, and that I should see her, on the point of death,
painfully recounting to us the most monstrous and most mysterious crime
I have heard of in my career? Who would have thought that I should be,
that afternoon, listening to the despairing father vainly trying to
explain how his daughter's assailant had been able to escape from him?
Why bury ourselves with our work in obscure retreats in the depths of
woods, if it may not protect us against those dangerous threats to life
which meet us in the busy cities?

"Now, Monsieur Stangerson," said Monsieur de Marquet, with somewhat
of an important air, "place yourself exactly where you were when
Mademoiselle Stangerson left you to go to her chamber."

Monsieur Stangerson rose and, standing at a certain distance from the
door of The Yellow Room, said, in an even voice and without the least
trace of emphasis--a voice which I can only describe as a dead voice:

"I was here. About eleven o'clock, after I had made a brief chemical
experiment at the furnaces of the laboratory, needing all the space
behind me, I had my desk moved here by Daddy Jacques, who spent the
evening in cleaning some of my apparatus. My daughter had been working
at the same desk with me. When it was her time to leave she rose, kissed
me, and bade Daddy Jacques goodnight. She had to pass behind my desk
and the door to enter her chamber, and she could do this only with some
difficulty. That is to say, I was very near the place where the crime
occurred later."

"And the desk?" I asked, obeying, in thus mixing myself in the
conversation, the express orders of my chief, "as soon as you heard
the cry of 'murder' followed by the revolver shots, what became of the
desk?"

Daddy Jacques answered.

"We pushed it back against the wall, here--close to where it is at the
present moment-so as to be able to get at the door at once."

I followed up my reasoning, to which, however, I attached but little
importance, regarding it as only a weak hypothesis, with another
question.

"Might not a man in the room, the desk being so near to the door, by
stooping and slipping under the desk, have left it unobserved?"

"You are forgetting," interrupted Monsieur Stangerson wearily, "that
my daughter had locked and bolted her door, that the door had remained
fastened, that we vainly tried to force it open when we heard the noise,
and that we were at the door while the struggle between the murderer and
my poor child was going on