Leva.s.seur, nor did he send for her. He caught sight of her several times giving orders to the new servants. She must afterward have gone back to her room, for he did not see her again.

In the afternoon he rang for his car and drove to the house on the Boulevard Suchet, to pursue with Mazeroux, by the Prefect's instructions, a search that led to no result whatever.

It was ten o'clock when he came in. The detective sergeant and he had some dinner together. Afterward, wishing also to examine the home of the man with the ebony stick, he got into his car again, still accompanied by Mazeroux, and told the man to drive to the Boulevard Richard-Wallace.

The car crossed the Seine and followed the right bank.

"Faster," he said to his new chauffeur, through the speaking-tube. "I'm accustomed to go at a good pace."

"You'll have an upset one fine day, Chief," said Mazeroux.

"No fear," replied Don Luis. "Motor accidents are reserved for fools."

They reached the Place de l'Alma. The car turned to the left.

"Straight ahead!" cried Don Luis. "Go up by the Trocadero."

The car veered back again. But suddenly it gave three or four lurches in the road, took the pavement, ran into a tree and fell over on its side.

In a few seconds a dozen people were standing round. They broke one of the windows and opened the door. Don Luis was the first.

"It's nothing," he said. "I'm all right. And you, Alexandre?"

They helped the sergeant out. He had a few bruises and a little pain, but no serious injury.

Only the chauffeur had been thrown from his seat and lay motionless on the pavement, bleeding from the head. He was carried into a chemist's shop and died in ten minutes.

Mazeroux had gone in with the poor victim and, feeling pretty well stunned, had himself been given a pick-me-up. When he went back to the motor car he found two policemen entering particulars of the accident in their notebooks and taking evidence from the bystanders; but the chief was not there.

Perenna in fact had jumped into a taxicab and driven home as fast as he could. He got out in the square, ran through the gateway, crossed the courtyard, and went down the pa.s.sage that led to Mlle. Leva.s.seur's quarters. He leaped up the steps, knocked, and entered without waiting for an answer.

The door of the room that served as a sitting-room was opened and Florence appeared. He pushed her back into the room, and said, in a tone furious with indignation:

"It's done. The accident has occurred. And yet none of the old servants can have prepared it, because they were not there and because I was out with the car this afternoon. Therefore, it must have been late in the day between six and nine o'clock, that somebody went to the garage and filed the steering-rod three quarters through."

"I don't understand. I don't understand," she said, with a scared look.

"You understand perfectly well that the accomplice of the ruffians cannot be one of the new servants, and you understand perfectly well that the job was bound to succeed and that it did succeed, beyond their hopes.

There is a victim, who suffers instead of myself."

"But tell me what has happened, Monsieur! You frighten me! What accident?

What was it?"

"The motor car was overturned. The chauffeur is dead."

"Oh," she said, "how horrible! And you think that I can have--Oh, dead, how horrible! Poor man!"

Her voice grew fainter. She was standing opposite to Perenna, close up against him. Pale and swooning, she closed her eyes, staggered.

He caught her in his arms as she fell. She tried to release herself, but had not the strength; and he laid her in a chair, while she moaned, repeatedly:

"Poor man! Poor man!"

Keeping one of his arms under the girl's head, he took a handkerchief in the other hand and wiped her forehead, which was wet with perspiration, and her pallid cheeks, down which the tears streamed.

She must have lost consciousness entirely, for she surrendered herself to Perenna's cares without the least resistance. And he, making no further movement, began anxiously to examine the mouth before his eyes, the mouth with the lips usually so red, now bloodless and discoloured.

Gently pa.s.sing one of his fingers over each of them, with a continuous pressure, he separated them, as one separates the petals of a flower; and the two rows of teeth appeared.

They were charming, beautifully shaped, and beautifully white; a little smaller perhaps than Mme. Fauville's, perhaps also arranged in a wider curve. But what did he know? Who could say that their bite would not leave the same imprint? It was an improbable supposition, an impossible miracle, he knew. And yet the circ.u.mstances were all against the girl and pointed to her as the most daring, cruel, implacable, and terrible of criminals.

Her breathing became regular. He perceived the cool fragrance of her mouth, intoxicating as the scent of a rose. In spite of himself, he bent down, came so close, so close that he was seized with giddiness and had to make a great effort to lay the girl's head on the back of the chair and to take his eyes from the fair face with the half-parted lips.

He rose to his feet and went.

CHAPTER EIGHT

THE DEVIL'S POST-OFFICE

Of all these events the public knew only of the attempted suicide of Mme.

Fauville, the capture and escape of Gaston Sauverand, the murder of Chief Inspector Ancenis, and the discovery of a letter written by Hippolyte Fauville. This was enough, however, to reawaken their curiosity, as they were already singularly puzzled by the Mornington case and took the greatest interest in all the movements, however slight, of the mysterious Don Luis Perenna, whom they insisted on confusing with a.r.s.ene Lupin.

He was, of course, credited with the brief capture of the man with the ebony walking-stick. It was also known that he had saved the life of the Prefect of Police, and that, finally, having at his own request spent the night in the house on the Boulevard Suchet, he had become the recipient of Hippolyte Fauville's famous letter. And all this added immensely to the excitement of the aforesaid public.

But how much more complicated and disconcerting were the problems set to Don Luis Perenna himself! Not to mention the denunciation in the anonymous article, there had been, in the short s.p.a.ce of forty-eight hours, no fewer than four separate attempts to kill him: by the iron curtain, by poison, by the shooting on the Boulevard Suchet, and by the deliberately prepared motor accident.

Florence's share in this series of attempts was not to be denied. And, now, behold her relations with the Fauvilles' murderers duly established by the little note found in the eighth volume of Shakespeare's plays, while two more deaths were added to the melancholy list: the deaths of Chief Inspector Ancenis and of the chauffeur. How to describe and how to explain the part played, in the midst of all these catastrophes, by that enigmatical girl?

Strangely enough, life went on as usual at the house in the Place du Palais-Bourbon, as though nothing out of the way had happened there.

Every morning Florence Leva.s.seur sorted Don Luis's post in his presence and read out the newspaper articles referring to himself or bearing upon the Mornington case.

Not a single allusion was made to the fierce fight that had been waged against him for two days. It was as though a truce had been proclaimed between them; and the enemy appeared to have ceased his attacks for the moment. Don Luis felt easy, out of the reach of danger; and he talked to the girl with an indifferent air, as he might have talked to anybody.

But with what a feverish interest he studied her un.o.bserved! He watched the expression of her face, at once calm and eager, and a painful sensitiveness which showed under the placid mask and which, difficult to control, revealed itself in the frequent quivering of the lips and nostrils.

"Who are you? Who are you?" he felt inclined to exclaim. "Will nothing content you, you she-devil, but to deal out murder all round? And do you want my death also, in order to attain your object? Where do you come from and where are you making for?"

On reflection, he was convinced of a certainty that solved a problem which had preoccupied him for a long time--namely, the mysterious connection between his own presence in the mansion in the Place du Palais-Bourbon and the presence of a woman who was manifestly wreaking her hatred on him.

He now understood that he had not bought the house by accident. In making the purchase he had been persuaded by an anonymous offer that reached him in the form of a typewritten prospectus. Whence did this offer come, if not from Florence, who wished to have him near her in order to spy upon him and wage war upon him?

"Yes," he thought, "that is where the truth lies. As the possible heir of Cosmo Mornington and a prominent figure in the case, I am the enemy, and they are trying to do away with me as they did with the others. And it is Florence who is acting against me. And it is she who has committed murder.

"Everything tells against her; nothing speaks in her defence. Her innocent eyes? The accent of sincerity in her voice? Her serene dignity?

And then? Yes, what then? Have I never seen women with that frank look who have committed murder for no reason, almost for pleasure's sake?"