ore scientific terms by the young Danish doctor, the
substance of what Bernardet believed possible. The young men had
listened with the attractive sympathy, which is displayed when anything
novel is explained. Rigid, upon the marble slab, the victim seemed to
wait for the result of the discussion, deaf to all the confused sounds
about him; his eye fixed upon the infinite, upon the unknowable which he
now knew.

It was, however, this insensible body which had caused the discussion of
what was an enigma to savants. What was the secret of his end? The last
word of his agony? Who made that wound which had ended his life? And
like a statue lying on its stone couch, the murdered man seemed to wait.
What they knew not, he knew. What they wished to know, he still knew,
perhaps! This doubt alone, rooted deep in M. Ginory's mind, was enough
to urge him to have the experiment tried, and, excusing himself for his
infatuation, he begged M. Morin to grant permission to try the
experiment, which some of the doctors had thought would be successful.

"We shall be relieved even if we do not succeed, and we can but add our
defeat to the others."

M. Morin's face still bore its sceptical smile. But after all, the
Examining Magistrate was master of the situation, and since young Dr.
Erwin brought the result of the Denmark experiment--a contribution new
in these researches--to add weight to the matter, the Professor
requested that he should not be asked to lend himself to an experiment
which he declared in advance would be a perfectly useless one.

There was a photographic apparatus at the Morgue as at the Prefecture,
used for anthropometry. Bernardet, moreover, had his kodak in his hand.
One could photograph the retina as soon as the membrane was separated
from the eye by the autopsy, and when, like the wing of a butterfly, it
had been fastened to a piece of cork. And while Bernardet was accustomed
to all the horrors of crime, yet he felt his heart beat almost to
suffocation during this operation. He noticed that M. Ginory became very
pale, and that he bit his lips, casting occasional pitying glances
toward the dead man. On the contrary, the young men bent over the body
and studied it with the admiration and joy of treasure seekers digging
in a mine. Each human fibre seemed to reveal to them some new truth.
They were like jewelers before a casket full of gems, and what they
studied, weighed, examined, was a human corpse. And when those e