as walked quickly along:

"Prends ton fusil, Gregoire,
Prends ta gourde pourboire,
Nos Messieurs sont partis
A la chasse aux perdrix."

One would have taken M. Bernardet for a happy little bourgeois, going
home from some theatre through the deserted streets and repeating a
verse from some vaudeville, rather than a police spy who had just
secured a prize. He walked quickly, he walked gaily. He reached his
home, where Mme. Bernardet, always rosy and pleasant, awaited him, and
where his three little girls were sleeping. He felt that, like the Roman
emperor, he had not lost his day.

He again hummed the quatrain, and, although not in a loud tone, still it
sounded like a far off fanfare of victory in the gray fog of this Paris
night.

CHAPTER XIV.

M. GINORY was not without uneasiness when he thought of the detention of
Jacques Dantin. Without doubt, all prisoners, all accused persons are
reticent; they try to hide their guilt under voluntary silence. They do
not speak, because they have sworn not to. They are bound, one knows not
by whom, by an oath which they cannot break. It is the ordinary system
of the guilty who cannot defend themselves. Mystery seems to them
safety.

But Dantin, intimately acquainted with Rovere's life, might be
acquainted with some secret which he could not disclose and which did
not pertain to him at all. What secret? Had not an examining magistrate
a right to know everything? Had not an accused man a right to speak?
Either Dantin had nothing to reveal and he was playing a comedy and was
guilty, or, if by a few words, by a confidence made to the magistrate he
could escape an accusation, recover his liberty, without doubt he would
speak after having kept an inexplicable silence. How could one suppose
that an innocent man would hold, for a long time, to this mute system?

The discovery of the portrait in Mme. Colard's shop ought, naturally, to
give to the affair a new turn. The arrest of Charles Prades brought an
important element to these researches. He would be examined by M. Ginory
the next morning, after having been questioned by the Commissary of
Police.

Bernardet, spruce, freshly shaven, was there, and seemed in his
well-brushed redingote, like a little abbe come to assist at some
curious ceremony.

On the contrary, Prades, after a sleepless night, a night of agony,
paler than the evening before, his face fierce