d smiling, entirely convinced that he was leading his
captors to the arrest of Captain Vauvenarde. On the threshold he turned
and bowed to us so low that the brim of his silk hat touched the
floor. Then Lola's nerve gave way and she broke into a passion of awful
weeping.

The _commissaire de police_ secured the long thin knife (how the dwarf
had managed to conceal it on his small person was a mystery) and the
bundle of documents, and accompanied me to my room to see whether he had
left anything there to serve as a _piece de conviction_. We found
only the crumpled picture of the horse Sultan neatly pinned against my
bedroom wall, and on the floor a ribbon tied like a garter with a little
bell opposite the bow. On it was written "Santa Bianca," and I knew it
was the collar of the beloved cat which he must have been carrying about
him for a talisman. The _commissaire_ took this also.

If you desire to know the details of the judicial proceedings connected
with the murder of Andre Marie-Joseph Vauvenarde, ex-Captain in the
Chasseurs d'Afrique, and the trial of Anastasius Papadopoulos, I must
refer you to the Algerian, Parisian, and London Press. There you will
find an eagerly picturesque account of the whole miserable affair. Now,
not only am I unable to compete with descriptive verbatim reporters
on their own ground, but also a consecutive statement, either bald or
graphic, of the tedious horrors Lola Brandt and I had to undergo,
would be foreign to the purpose of these notes, however far from their
original purpose an ironical destiny has caused them to wander. You know
nearly all that is necessary for you to know, so that when I am dead
you may not judge me too harshly. The remainder I can summarise in a few
words. At any rate, I have told the truth, often more naively than one
would have thought possible for a man who prided himself as much as I
did on his epicurean sophistication.

These have been days, as I say, of tedious horror. There have been
endless examinations, reconstructions of the crime, exposures in daring
publicity of the private lives of the protagonists of the lunatic drama.
The French judges and advocates have accepted the account given by Lola
and myself of our mutual relations with a certain mocking credulity. The
Press hasn't accepted it at all. It took as a matter of course the
view held by the none too noble victim. At first, seeing Lola shrug her
shoulders with supreme indifference as to her