t five he came home."

"That, also, is a well-known fact."

"After dinner he went out to play a game, but it was his only
amusement; and at eleven o'clock he was always in bed."

"Perfectly correct."

"Well, then, sir, where could M. Favoral have found time to abandon
himself to the excesses of which you accuse him?"

Imperceptibly the commissary of police shrugged his shoulders.

"Far from me, madame," he uttered, "to doubt your good faith. What
matters it, moreover, whether your husband spent in this way or in
that way the sums which he is charged with having appropriated? But
what do your objections prove? Simply that M. Favoral was very
skillful, and very much self-possessed. Had he breakfasted when he
left you at nine? No. Pray, then, where did he breakfast? In a
restaurant? Which? Why did he come home only at half-past five,
when his office actually closed at three o'clock? Are you quite
sure that it was to the Cafe Turc that he went every evening?
Finally, why do not you say anything of the extra work which he
always had to attend to, as he pretended, once or twice a month?
Sometimes it was a loan, sometimes a liquidation, or a settlement
of dividends, which devolved upon him. Did he come home then? No.
He told you that he would dine out, and that it would be more
convenient for him to have a cot put up in his office; and thus
you were twenty-four or forty-eight hours without seeing him.
Surely this double existence must have weighed heavily upon him;
but he was forbidden from breaking off with you, under penalty of
being caught the very next day with his hand in the till. It is
the respectability of his official life here which made the other
possible,--that which has absorbed such enormous sums. The harsher
and the closer he were here, the more magnificent he could show
himself elsewhere. His household in the Rue St. Gilles was for
him a certificate of impunity. Seeing him so economical, every one
thought him rich. People who seem to spend nothing are always
trusted. Every privation which he imposed upon you increased his
reputation of austere probity, and raised him farther above
suspicion."

Big tears were rolling down Mme. Favoral's cheeks.

"Why not tell me the whole truth?" she stammered.

"Because I do not know it," replied the commissary; "because these
are all mere presumptions. I have seen so many instances of similar
calculations!"

Then regretting, perhaps, to have sa