e, about that sum, this would
have required four trips to and from the clover-patch. Now, a singular
circumstance went far to prove the hour at which the crime was
committed. In the terror Jeanne Malassis must have felt on hearing her
master's cries, she knocked over, as she rose, the table at her bedside,
on which lay her watch, the only present the miser had given her in five
years. The mainspring was broken by the shock, and the hands had stopped
at two in the morning. By the middle of March (the date of the murder)
daylight dawns between five and six o'clock. To whatever distance the
gold had been carried, Tascheron could not possibly, under any apparent
hypothesis, have transported it alone.

The care with which some of the footsteps were effaced, while others,
to which Tascheron's shoes fitted, remained, certainly pointed to some
mysterious assistant. Forced into hypotheses, the authorities once more
attributed the crime to a desperate passion; not finding any trace of
the object of such a passion in the lower classes, they began to look
higher. Perhaps some bourgeoise, sure of the discretion of a man who
had the face and bearing of a hero, had been drawn into a romance the
outcome of which was crime.

This supposition was to some extent justified by the facts of the
murder. The old man had been killed by blows with a spade; evidently,
therefore, the murder was sudden, unpremeditated, fortuitous. The lovers
might have planned the robbery, but not the murder. The lover and the
miser, Tascheron and Pingret, each under the influence of his master
passion, must have met by the buried hoards, both drawn thither by the
gleaming of gold on the utter darkness of that fatal night.

In order to obtain, if possible, some light on this latter supposition,
the authorities arrested and kept in solitary confinement a sister of
Jean-Francois, to whom he was much attached, hoping to obtain through
her some clue to the mystery of her brother's private life. Denise
Tascheron took refuge in total denial of any knowledge whatever, which
gave rise to a suspicion that she did know something of the causes of
the crime, although in fact she knew nothing.

The accused himself showed points of character that were rare amongst
the peasantry. He baffled the cleverest police-spies employed against
him, without knowing their real character. To the leading minds of the
magistracy his guilt seemed caused by the influence of passion, and not
b