eft.

"Straight ahead!" cried Don Luis. "Go up by the Trocadero."

The car veered back again. But suddenly it gave three or four lurches in
the road, took the pavement, ran into a tree and fell over on its side.

In a few seconds a dozen people were standing round. They broke one of
the windows and opened the door. Don Luis was the first.

"It's nothing," he said. "I'm all right. And you, Alexandre?"

They helped the sergeant out. He had a few bruises and a little pain, but
no serious injury.

Only the chauffeur had been thrown from his seat and lay motionless on
the pavement, bleeding from the head. He was carried into a chemist's
shop and died in ten minutes.

Mazeroux had gone in with the poor victim and, feeling pretty well
stunned, had himself been given a pick-me-up. When he went back to the
motor car he found two policemen entering particulars of the accident in
their notebooks and taking evidence from the bystanders; but the chief
was not there.

Perenna in fact had jumped into a taxicab and driven home as fast as he
could. He got out in the square, ran through the gateway, crossed the
courtyard, and went down the passage that led to Mlle. Levasseur's
quarters. He leaped up the steps, knocked, and entered without waiting
for an answer.

The door of the room that served as a sitting-room was opened and
Florence appeared. He pushed her back into the room, and said, in a tone
furious with indignation:

"It's done. The accident has occurred. And yet none of the old servants
can have prepared it, because they were not there and because I was out
with the car this afternoon. Therefore, it must have been late in the
day between six and nine o'clock, that somebody went to the garage and
filed the steering-rod three quarters through."

"I don't understand. I don't understand," she said, with a scared look.

"You understand perfectly well that the accomplice of the ruffians cannot
be one of the new servants, and you understand perfectly well that the
job was bound to succeed and that it did succeed, beyond their hopes.
There is a victim, who suffers instead of myself."

"But tell me what has happened, Monsieur! You frighten me! What accident?
What was it?"

"The motor car was overturned. The chauffeur is dead."

"Oh," she said, "how horrible! And you think that I can have--Oh, dead,
how horrible! Poor man!"

Her voice grew fainter. She was standing opposite to Perenna, close up
against him. Pale and sw