he
was not shut up in a maniac's cell; if the question was real; if the
voice he heard was not the voice of a dream!

"How can I explain? but I cannot explain, I do not understand, I do not
know--it is madness, it is frightful, it is foolish!"

"But yet," insisted M. Ginory, "this folly, as you call it, must have
some explanation."

"What do you wish to have me say? I do not understand. I repeat, I do
not understand."

"What if you do not, you cannot deny your presence in the house at the
moment of Rovere's death"----

"Why cannot I deny it?" Dantin interrupted.

"Because the vision is there, hidden, hazy, in the retina; because this
photograph, in which you recognized yourself, denounces, points out,
your presence at the moment of the last agony."

"I was not there! I swear that I was not there!" Dantin fervently
declared.

"Then, explain," said the Magistrate.

Dantin remained silent a moment, as if frightened. Then he stammered: "I
am dreaming!--I dreaming!" and M. Ginory replied in a calm tone:

"Notice that I attribute no exaggerated importance to these proofs. It
is not on them alone that I base the accusation. But they constitute a
strange witness, very disquieting in its mute eloquence. They add to the
doubt which your desire for silence has awakened. You tell me that you
were not near Rovere when he died. These proofs, irrefutable as a fact,
seem to prove at once the contrary. Then, the day Rovere was
assassinated where were you?"

"I do not know. At home, without doubt. I will have to think it over. At
what hour was Rovere killed?"

M. Ginory made a gesture of ignorance and in a tone of raillery said:
"That! There are others who know it better than I." And Dantin,
irritated, looked at him.

"Yes," went on the Magistrate, with mocking politeness, "the surgeons
who can tell the hour in which he was killed." He turned over his
papers. "The assassination was about an hour before midday. In Paris, in
broad daylight, at that hour, a murder was committed!"

"At that hour," said Jacques Dantin, "I was just leaving home."

"To go where?"

"For a walk. I had a headache. I was going to walk in the Champs-Elysees
to cure it."

"And did you, in your walk, meet any one whom you knew?"

"No one."

"Did you go into some shop?"

"I did not."

"In short, you have no _alibi_?"

The word made Dantin again tremble. He felt the meshes of the net
closing around him.

"An _alibi_! Ah that! Decidedly.