pression as
you looked at the deeds, bills and coupons."

"Those coupons," asked Dantin rather anxiously, "have they, then, been
stolen?"

"Ah, that we know nothing about," and the Magistrate smiled.

"One has found in Rovere's safe in the neighborhood of 460,000 francs in
coupons, city of Paris bonds, shares in mining societies, rent rolls;
but nothing to prove that there was before the assassination more than
that sum."

"Had it been forced open?"

"No; but anyone familiar with the dead man, a friend who knew the secret
of the combination of the safe, the four letters forming the word, could
have opened it without trouble."

Among these words Dantin heard one which struck him full in the
face--"friend." M. Ginory had pronounced it in an ordinary tone, but
Dantin had seized and read in it a menace. For a moment the man who was
being questioned felt a peculiar sensation. It seemed to him one day
when he had been almost drowned during a boating party that same agony
had seized him; it seemed that he had fallen into some abyss, some icy
pool, which was paralyzing him. Opposite to him the Examining Magistrate
experienced a contrary feeling. The caster of a hook and line feels a
similar sensation; but it was intensified a hundred times in the
Magistrate, a fisher of truth, throwing the line into a human sea, the
water polluted, red with blood and mixed with mud.

A friend! A friend could have abused the dead man's secret and opened
that safe! And that friend--what name did he bear? Whom did M. Ginory
wish to designate? Dantin, in spite of his _sang froid_, experienced a
violent temptation to ask the man what he meant by those words. But the
strange sensation which this interview caused him increased. It seemed
to him that he had been there a long time--a very long time since he
had crossed that threshold--and that this little room, separated from
the world like a monk's cell, had walls thick enough to prevent any one
from hearing anything outside. He felt as if hypnotized by that man, who
at first had met him with a pleasant air, and who now bent upon him
those hard eyes. Something doubtful, like vague danger, surrounded him,
menaced him, and he mechanically followed the gesture which M. Ginory
made as he touched the ivory button of an electric bell, as if on this
gesture depended some event of his life. A guard entered. M. Ginory said
to him in a short tone: "Have the notes been brought?"

"M. Bernardet has just