"

"What sort of thing?"

"I don't know. But something is bound to take place. And I insist on
being at it. Is it arranged?"

"Right, Chief. Unless you hear to the contrary, I'll meet you at nine
o'clock this evening on the Boulevard Suchet."

Perenna did not see Mlle. Levasseur again that day. He went out in the
course of the afternoon, and called at the registry office, where he
chose some servants: a chauffeur, a coachman, a footman, a cook, and so
on. Then he went to a photographer, who made a new copy of Mlle.
Levasseur's photograph. Don Luis had this touched up and faked it
himself, so that the Prefect of Police should not perceive the
substitution of one set of features for another.

He dined at a restaurant and, at nine o'clock, joined Mazeroux on the
Boulevard Suchet.

Since the Fauville murders the house had been left in the charge of the
porter. All the rooms and all the locks had been sealed up, except the
inner door of the workroom, of which the police kept the keys for the
purposes of the inquiry.

The big study looked as it did before, though the papers had been removed
and put away and there were no books and pamphlets left on the
writing-table. A layer of dust, clearly visible by the electric light,
covered its black leather and the surrounding mahogany.

"Well, Alexandre, old man," cried Don Luis, when they had made themselves
comfortable, "what do you say to this? It's rather impressive, being here
again, what? But, this time, no barricading of doors, no bolts, eh? If
anything's going to happen, on this night of the fifteenth of April,
we'll put nothing in our friends' way. They shall have full and entire
liberty. It's up to them, this time."

Though joking, Don Luis was nevertheless singularly impressed, as he
himself said, by the terrible recollection of the two crimes which he had
been unable to prevent and by the haunting vision of the two dead bodies.
And he also remembered with real emotion the implacable duel which he had
fought with Mme. Fauville, the woman's despair and her arrest.

"Tell me about her," he said to Mazeroux. "So she tried to kill herself?"

"Yes," said Mazeroux, "a thoroughgoing attempt, though she had to make
it in a manner which she must have hated. She hanged herself in strips
of linen torn from her sheets and underclothing and twisted together.
She had to be restored by artificial respiration. She is out of danger
now, I believe, but she is never left alone, f