ld hear only a murmur. And she had very good ears, too. But she heard
only confused sounds, not one plain word. When, however, the visitor was
going away she heard Rovere say to him: "I ought to have told all
earlier."

Did the dead man possess a secret which weighed heavily upon him, and
which he shared with that other? And the other? Who was he? Perhaps an
accomplice. Everything she had said belonged to the Commissary of Police
and to the press. She had told her story with omissions, with timorous
looks, with sighs of doubts and useless gestures. Bernardet listened,
noting each word, the purposes of this portress, the melodramatic gossip
in certain information in which he verified the precision--all this was
engraven on his brain, as earlier in the day the expression of the dead
man's eyes had been reflected in the kodak.

He tried to distinguish, as best he could, the undeniable facts in this
first deposition, when a woman of the people, garrulous, indiscreet,
gossiping and zealous, has the joy of playing a role. He mentally
examined her story, with the interruptions which her husband made when
she accused the individual. He stopped her with a look, placing his hand
on her arm and said: "One must wait! One does not know. He had the
appearance of a worthy man." The woman, pointing out with a grand
gesture, the body lying upon the floor, said: "Oh, well! And did not M.
Rovere have the appearance of a worthy man also? And did it hinder him
from coming to that?"

Over Bernardet's face a mocking little smile passed.

"He always had the appearance of a worthy man," he said, looking at the
dead man, "and he even seemed like a worthy man who looked at rascals
with courage. I am certain," slowly added the officer, "that if one
could know the last thought in that brain which thinks no more, could
see in those unseeing eyes the last image upon which they looked, one
would learn all that need be known about that individual of whom you
speak and the manner of his death."

"Possibly he killed himself," said the Commissary.

But the hypothesis of suicide was not possible, as Bernardet remarked to
him, much to the great contempt of the reporters who were covering their
notebooks with a running handwriting and with hieroglyphics. The wound
was too deep to have been made by the man's own hand. And, besides, they
would find the weapon with which that horrible gash had been made, near
at hand. There was no weapon of any kind near