“But stay,” said the magistrate: “did Michel never tell you, when he was alive, how he lost his sight?”
“No—but the morning before I was arrested, he promised me to do so; and that was the cause of his death.”
“How could that be?”
“Last night, Michel came to me, and he pointed to the man hidden behind the scaffolding on which he and I had been sitting. He showed me the man listening to us, when he said, ‘I’ll tell you all about that to-night;’ and then the man——”
“Do you know the name of this man?”
“It is Luck. He went afterward to a broad street that leads down to the harbor, and he entered the third house on the right——”
“What is the name of the street?”
“I don’t know: but the house is one story lower than the adjoining ones. Luck told Catherine what he had heard, and she proposed to him to assassinate Michel; but he refused, saying, ‘It was bad enough to have burnt out his eyes fifteen years before, while he was asleep at your door, and to have kidnapped him into the country.’ Then I went in to ask charity, and Catherine put a piece of plate into my pocket, that I might be arrested; then she hid herself behind the aqueduct to wait for Michel, and she killed him.”
“But, since you say all this, why did you keep the plate—why didn’t you give information?”
“But I didn’t see it then. Michel showed it me last night.”