"She was sallow, with black hair and bright eyes like beads. She was short and about forty-five years old, though it is difficult to judge of these things. I noticed her hands, for she was taking her gloves off, and they seemed to me to be unusually muscular for a woman."
"Ah!" cried Louis Besnard. "That is important."
"Mme. Dauvray was, as she always was before a seance, in a feverish flutter. 'You will help Mlle. Celie to dress, Helene, and be very quick,' she said; and with an extraordinary longing she added, 'Perhaps we shall see her to-night.' Her, you understand, was Mme. de Montespan." And she turned to the stranger and said, "You will believe, Adele, after to-night."
"Adele!" said the Commissaire wisely. "Then Adele was the strange woman's name?"
"Perhaps," said Hanaud dryly.
Helene Vauquier reflected.
"I think Adele was the name," she said in a more doubtful tone. "It sounded like Adele."
The irrepressible Mr. Ricardo was impelled to intervene.
"What Monsieur Hanaud means," he explained, with the pleasant air of a man happy to illuminate the dark intelligence of a child, "is that Adele was probably a pseudonym."
Hanaud turned to him with a savage grin.