ce. They told of a final struggle, of some atrocious duel of
looks and of words. They appeared, in their ferocious immobility, as
when they gazed upon the murderer, eye to eye, face to face.

Bernardet looked at the hands.

They were contracted and seemed, in some obstinate resistance, to have
clung to the neck or the clothing of the assassin.

"There ought to be blood under the nails, since he made a struggle,"
said Bernardet, thinking aloud.

And Paul Rodier, the reporter, hurriedly wrote, "There was blood under
the nails."

Bernardet returned again and again to the eyes--those wide-open eyes,
frightful, terrible eyes, which, in their fierce depths, retained
without doubt the image or phantom of some nightmare of death.

He touched the dead man's hand. The flesh had become cold and _rigor
mortis_ was beginning to set in.

The reporter saw the little man take from his pocket a sort of rusty
silver ribbon and unroll it, and heard him ask Moniche to take hold of
one end of it; this ribbon or thread looked to Paul Rodier like brass
wire. Bernardet prepared his kodak.

"Above everything else," murmured Bernardet, "let us preserve the
expression of those eyes."

"Close the shutters. The darkness will be more complete."

The reporter assisted Moniche in order to hasten the work. The shutters
closed, the room was quite dark, and Bernardet began his task. Counting
off a few steps, he selected the best place from which to take the
picture.

"Be kind enough to light the end of the magnesium wire," he said to the
concierge. "Have you any matches?"

"No, M. Bernardet."

The police office indicated by a sign of the head, a match safe which he
had noticed on entering the room.

"There are some there."

Bernardet had with one sweeping glance of the eye taken in everything in
the room; the fauteuils, scarcely moved from their places; the pictures
hanging on the walls; the mirrors; the bookcases; the cabinets, etc.

Moniche went to the mantelpiece and took a match from the box. It was M.
Rovere himself who furnished the light by which a picture of his own
body was taken.

"We could obtain no picture in this room without the magnesium wire,"
said the agent, as calm while taking a photograph of the murdered man,
as he had been a short time ago in his garden. "The light is
insufficient. When I say: 'Go!' Moniche you must light the wire, and I
will take three or four negatives. Do you understand? Stand there to my
le