say, to use a commonplace but very accurate expression, that what
happened came as an absolute bolt from the blue. I heard at the same
time, when the Prefect of Police and his men broke into my house and
proceeded to arrest me, I heard at the same time and for the first time
of the murder of Hippolyte Fauville, the murder of Edmond, and the arrest
of my adored Marie."

"Impossible!" cried Don Luis, in a renewed tone of aggressive wrath.
"Impossible! Those facts were a fortnight old. I cannot allow that you
had not heard of them."

"Through whom?"

"Through the papers," exclaimed Don Luis. "And, more certainly still,
through Mlle. Levasseur."

"Through the papers?" said Sauverand. "I never used to read them. What!
Is that incredible? Are we under an obligation, an inevitable necessity,
to waste half an hour a day in skimming through the futilities of
politics and the piffle of the news columns? Is your imagination
incapable of conceiving a man who reads nothing but reviews and
scientific publications?

"The fact is rare, I admit," he continued. "But the rarity of a fact is
no proof against it. On the other hand, on the very morning of the crime
I had written to Florence saying that I was going away for three weeks
and bidding her good-bye. I changed my mind at the last moment; but this
she did not know; and, thinking that I had gone, not knowing where I was,
she was unable to inform me of the crime, of Marie's arrest, or, later,
when an accusation was brought against the man with the ebony
walking-stick, of the search that was being made for me."

"Exactly!" declared Don Luis. "You cannot pretend that the man with the
ebony walking-stick, the man who followed Inspector Verot to the Cafe du
Pont-Neuf and purloined his letter--"

"I am not the man," Sauverand interrupted.

And, when Don Luis shrugged his shoulders, he insisted, in a more
forcible tone of voice:

"I am not that man. There is some inexplicable mistake in all this, but I
have never set foot in the Cafe du Pont-Neuf. I swear it. You must accept
this statement as positively true. Besides, it agrees entirely with the
retired life which I was leading from necessity and from choice. And, I
repeat, I knew nothing.

"The thunderbolt was unexpected. And it was precisely for this reason,
you must understand, that the shock produced in me an equally unexpected
reaction, a state of mind diametrically opposed to my real nature, an
outburst of my most savage