I shrugged my shoulders.
"After all," I said, "I suppose the truth will come out. Have you any idea, I wonder, where those two hundred thousand pounds are?"
"I, monsieur!"—Louis held out his hands. "Delora has had several hours to dispose of them. If he had taken my advice he would have been flying to the south coast in his motor by now. As to the money, well, it may be anywhere"
"It may, Louis!" I admitted.
"Delora was a bungler," Louis said slowly. "The game was in his hands. Even the reappearance of his brother was not serious. He was carrying out a perfectly legitimate transaction in which no one could interfere."
"Excepting," I remarked, "that he proposed to retain the proceeds of this sale of his."
"That would have been hard to prove if he had chosen to assert the contrary," Louis remarked. "Vanhallon would have had little enough to say if the money had passed into his hands."
"And the Chinese ambassador?" I remarked.
"His documents would have been good enough," Louis replied. "He has the ships. He has value for his money. There was no need for Delora to have despaired. His behavior during this last hour has been the behavior of a child. Monsieur will pardon me!"
Louis glided away, and I saw him smilingly escorting a party of late guests to their places. I stood where I was and watched him. To me, the man was something amazing! I firmly believed, even at that moment, that he had, safely hidden, part, if not the whole, of the proceeds of this gigantic scheme of fraud. I believed, too, that his had been the hand which had killed Delora. And there he was, within a few minutes of the time when the tragedy had happened, waiting upon his guests, consulted about the vintages of wines, suggesting dishes! Upstairs Delora lay, with a little blue mark upon his temple! It was the survival of the fittest, this, in crime as well as in the other things of life!