rapper's instinct. Some one was
coming. Who it could be was of little importance. To remain was to
expose himself, to be at once arrested. The corpse once seen, the person
would cry aloud, rush out, close the door and send for the police.

Hesitating between a desire to pillage and the necessity for fright,
Prades did not wait long to decide. Should he hide? Impossible! Then,
stepping back to the salon door, he flattened himself as much as
possible against the wall and waited until the door should be opened
when he would be completely hidden behind it. As Mme. Moniche stepped
into the room and cried out as she saw Rovere lying on the floor, Prades
slipped into the ante-chamber, found himself on the landing, closed the
door, rapidly descended the stairs and stepped out upon the Boulevard de
Clichy among the passers-by, even before Mme. Moniche, terrified, had
called for help.

CHAPTER XVII.

ALL the details of that murder, M. Ginory had drawn, one by one, from
Prades in his examination. The murderer denied at first; hesitated;
discussed; then at last, like a cask with the bung out, from which pours
not wine, but blood, the prisoner told all; confessed; recounted;
loosened his tongue; abandoned himself weakened and conquered, weary of
his misery.

"I was so foolish, so stupid," he violently said, "as to keep the
portrait. I believed that the frame was worth a fortune. Fool! I sold it
for a hundred sous!"

He gave the merchant's address, it was on the Quai Saint Michel.
Bernardet found the frame as he had found the painted panel, and this
time, no great credit was due him.

"Now," said he, "the affair is ended, _classe_. My children (he was
relating his adventures to his little girls), we must pass to another.
And why"--

"Why, what?" asked Mme. Bernardet.

"Eh! there it is! Why--it lacks the elucidation of a problem. I will
see! I will know!"

He still remembered the young Danish doctor, whom he had seen with M.
Morin at the autopsy. With his knowledge of men, with the sharp, keen
eye of the police officer, Bernardet had recognized a man of superior
mind; a mind dreamy and mysterious. He knew where Dr. Erwin lived during
his sojourn in Paris, and he went to his apartment one beautiful morning
and rang the bell at the door of a hotel in the Boulevard Saint Martin,
where students and strangers lodge. He might have asked advice of M.
Morin, of the master of French Science, but