light which
fell full on him from the window, the portress involuntarily exclaimed,
"Ah!" She was evidently much excited, and caught the police officer by
the hand and said:

"I am afraid!"

She spoke in such a low tone that Bernardet divined rather than heard
what she meant in that stifled cry. He looked at her from the corner of
his eye. He saw that she was ghastly, and again she spoke in a low tone:
"He! he whom I saw with M. Rovere before the open safe!"

Bernardet gave the man one sweeping glance of the eye. He fairly pierced
him through with his sharp look. The unknown, half bent over the table
whereon lay the papers, showed a wide forehead, slightly bald, and a
pointed beard, a little gray, which almost touched the white paper as he
wrote his name.

Suddenly the police officer experienced a strange sensation; it seemed
to him that this face, the shape of the head, the pointed beard, he had
recently seen somewhere, and that this human silhouette recalled to him
an image which he had recently studied. The perception of a possibility
of a proof gave him a shock. This man who was there made him think
suddenly of that phantom discernible in the photographs taken of the
retina of the murdered man's eye.

"Who is that man?"

Bernardet shivered with pleasurable excitement, and, insisting upon his
own impression that this unknown strongly recalled the image obtained,
and mentally he compared this living man, bending over the table,
writing his name, with that spectre which had the air of a trooper which
appeared in the photograph. The contour was the same, not only of the
face, but the beard. This man reminded one of a Seigneur of the time of
Henry III., and Bernardet found in that face something formidable. The
man had signed his name. He raised his head, and his face, of a dull
white, was turned full toward the police officer; their looks crossed,
keen on Bernardet's side, veiled in the unknown. But before the fixity
of the officer's gaze the strange man dropped his head for a moment;
then, in his turn, he fixed a piercing, almost menacing, gaze on
Bernardet. Then the latter slowly dropped his eyes and bowed; the
unknown went out quickly and was lost in the crowd before the house.

"It is he! it is he!" repeated the portress, who trembled as if she had
seen a ghost.

Scarcely had the unknown disappeared than the police officer took but
two steps to reach the table, and bending over it in his turn, he read
the