"The rogues are cleverer than I thought," he said simply.
"Rogues?" growled M. Cognard. "I for one do not believe that they are rogues. If Jacques de Romaine entered this house on Tuesday night and has not left it since, where is he now? Answer me that, Monsieur Fernand!"
"Do you think I have murdered him?" retorted the secret agent calmly.
Then he went into the house.
He found Mme. la Comtesse de Romaine entrenched within that barrier of lofty incredulity which she had set up the moment that she heard of the grave suspicion which rested upon her son.
"A Comte de Romaine, Monsieur," she said in her thin, cracked voice in answer to every query put to her by the Man in Grey, "who is also Seigneur de Mazaire and a peer of France, does not steal the jewels of a dancer. If, as that wench asserts, my son had her trinkets that night about his person, then obviously it is for you who were lurking around my house like a thief in the night to give an account of what became of him."
"Your son entered this house last Tuesday night, Madame," answered Fernand firmly, "and has not been out of it since."
"Then I pray you find him, Sir," was Madame de Romaine's rejoinder.
Mademoiselle Mariette's attitude was equally uncompromising. She bore every question and cross-question unflinchingly. But when the secret agent finally left her in peace to initiate a thorough search inside that house which so bafflingly refused to give up its secret, she turned to the chief commissary of police.
"Who is that anonymous creature," she queried with passionate indignation, "who heaps insults and tortures upon my dear mother and me? Why is he not being questioned? Whose is the hidden hand that shields him when retribution should be marking him for its own?"