There was a moment's silence; then, I decided, the time had come for me to speak.
"Godfrey," I said, "what I am about to tell you is told in confidence, and must be held in confidence until I give you permission to use it. Do you agree?"
"Go on," he said, his eyes on my face.
"Well, I believe I know how these two men were killed. Listen."
And I told him in detail the story of the Boule cabinet; I repeated Vantine's theory of its first ownership; I named the price which he was ready to pay for it; I described the difference between an original and a counterpart, and dwelt upon Vantine's assertion that this was an original of unique and unquestionable artistry. Long before I had finished, Godfrey was out of his chair and pacing up and down the room, his face flushed, his eyes glowing.
"Beautiful!" he murmured from time to time. "Immense! What a case it will make, Lester!" he cried, stopping before my chair and beaming down upon me, as I finished the story. "Unique, too; that's the beauty of it! As unique as this adorable Boule cabinet!"
"Then you see it, too?" I questioned, a little disappointed that my theory should seem so evident.
"See it?" and he dropped into his chair again. "A man would be blind not to see it. But all the same, Lester, I give you credit for putting the facts together. So many of us—Grady, for instance! —aren't able to do that, or to see which facts are essential and which are negligible. Now the fact that Vantine had accidentally come into possession of a Boule cabinet would probably seem negligible to Grady, whereas it is the one big essential fact in this whole case. And it was you who saw it."
"You saw it, too," I pointed out, "as soon as I mentioned it."
"Yes; but you mentioned it in a way which made its importance manifest. I couldn't help seeing it. And I believe that we have both arrived at practically the same conclusions. Here they are," and he checked them off on his fingers. "The cabinet contains a secret drawer. This is inevitable, if it really belonged to Madame de Montespan. Any cabinet made for her would be certain to have a secret drawer—she would require it, just as she would require lace on her underwear or jewelled buttons on her gloves. That drawer, since it was, perhaps, to contain such priceless documents as the love letters of a king—even more so, if the love letters were from another man! —must be adequately guarded, and therefore a mechanism was devised to stab the person attempting to open it and to inject into the wound a poison so powerful as to cause instant death. Am I right so far?"