“Heavens! Are you wounded?”
“Yes, it is a little souvenir of your friend Raoul. Ah, I will soon teach him the danger of chopping up a man’s arm!”
Prosper was surprised at the look of merciless rage on his friend’s face, as he calmly washed and dressed his arm.
“Now, Prosper, we will talk as much as you please. Our enemies are on the alert, and we must crush them instantly, or not at all. I have made a mistake. I have been on the wrong track; it is an accident liable to happen to any man, no matter how intelligent he may be. I took the effect for the cause. The day I was convinced that culpable relations existed between Raoul and Mme. Fauvel, I thought I held the end of the thread that must lead us to the truth. I should have been more mistrustful; this solution was too simple, too natural.”
“Do you suppose Mme. Fauvel to be innocent?”
“Certainly not. But her guilt is not such as I first supposed. I imagined that, infatuated with a seductive young adventurer, Mme. Fauvel had first bestowed upon him the name of one of her relatives, and then introduced him as her nephew. This was an adroit stratagem to gain him admission to her husband’s house.
“She began by giving him all the money she could could dispose of; later she let him take her jewels to the pawnbrokers; when she had nothing more to give, she allowed him to steal the money from her husband’s safe. That is what I first thought.”
“And in this way everything was explained?”
“No, this did not explain everything, as I well knew at the time, and should, consequently, have studied my characters more thoroughly. How is Clameran’s position to be accounted for, if my first idea was the correct one?”
“Clameran is Lagors’s accomplice of course.”