ts silence, and cried, with a sudden
violence:

"There is something here, gentlemen, which I do not understand."

Mr. Ricardo heard some one beside him draw a deep breath, and turned.
Wethermill stood at his elbow. A faint colour had come back to his
cheeks, his eyes were fixed intently upon Hanaud's face.

"What do you think?" he asked; and Hanaud replied brusquely:

"It's not my business to hold opinions, monsieur; my business is to
make sure."

There was one point, and only one, of which he had made every one in
that room sure. He had started confident. Here was a sordid crime,
easily understood. But in that room he had read something which had
troubled him, which had raised the sordid crime on to some higher and
perplexing level.

"Then M. Fleuriot after all might be right?" asked the Commissaire
timidly.

Hanaud stared at him for a second, then smiled.

"L'affaire Dreyfus?" he cried. "Oh la, la, la! No, but there is
something else."

What was that something? Ricardo asked himself. He looked once more
about the room. He did not find his answer, but he caught sight of an
ornament upon the wall which drove the question from his mind. The
ornament, if so it could be called, was a painted tambourine with a
bunch of bright ribbons tied to the rim; and it was hung upon the wall
between the settee and the fireplace at about the height of a man's
head. Of course it might be no more than it seemed to be--a rather
gaudy and vulgar toy, such as a woman like Mme. Dauvray would be very
likely to choose in order to dress her walls. But it swept Ricardo's
thoughts back of a sudden to the concert-hall at Leamington and the
apparatus of a spiritualistic show. After all, he reflected
triumphantly, Hanaud had not noticed everything, and as he made the
reflection Hanaud's voice broke in to corroborate him.

"We have seen everything here; let us go upstairs," he said. "We will
first visit the room of Mlle. Celie. Then we will question the maid,
Helene Vauquier."

The four men, followed by Perrichet, passed out by the door into the
hall and mounted the stairs. Celia's room was in the southwest angle of
the villa, a bright and airy room, of which one window overlooked the
road, and two others, between which stood the dressing-table, the
garden. Behind the room a door led into a little white-tiled bathroom.
Some towels were tumbled upon the floor beside the bath. In the bedroom
a dark-grey frock of tussore and a petticoat we