another at
intervals of ten days, he remarked the resemblance between the writing
and the writing of the rough draft.

The draft was in a notebook in his pocket. He was therefore in a
position to verify the similarity of the two handwritings and of the two
ruled sheets of paper. He took his notebook and opened it. The draft was
not there.

"Gad," he snarled, "but this is a bit too thick!"

And, at the same time, he remembered clearly that, when he was
telephoning to Mazeroux in the morning, the notebook was in the pocket of
his overcoat and that he had left his overcoat on a chair near the
telephone box. Now, at that moment, Mlle. Levasseur, for no reason, was
roaming about the study. What was she doing there?

"Oh, the play-actress!" thought Perenna, raging within himself. "She was
humbugging me. Her tears, her air of frankness, her tender memories: all
bunkum! She belongs to the same stock and the same gang as Marie
Fauville and Gaston Sauverand. Like them, she is an accomplished liar
and actress from her slightest gesture down to the least inflection of
her innocent voice."

He was on the point of having it all out with her and confounding her.
This time, the proof was undeniable. Dreading an inquiry which might have
brought the facts home to her, she had been unwilling to leave the draft
of the article in the adversary's hands.

How could he doubt, from this moment, that she was the accomplice
employed by the people who were working the Mornington affair and trying
to get rid of him? Had he not every right to suppose that she was
directing the sinister gang, and that, commanding the others with her
audacity and her intelligence, she was leading them toward the obscure
goal at which they were aiming?

For, after all, she was free, entirely free in her actions and movements.
The windows opening on the Place du Palais-Bourbon gave her every
facility for leaving the house under cover of the darkness and coming in
again unknown to anybody.

It was therefore quite possible that, on the night of the double crime,
she was among the murderers of Hippolyte Fauville and his son. It was
quite possible that she had taken part in the murders, and even that the
poison had been injected into the victims by her hand, by that little,
white, slender hand which he saw resting against the golden hair.

A shudder passed through him. He had softly put back the paper in the
book, restored the book in its place, and moved nearer