“Him, or someone else.”
“Excuse me: no one else, since he alone knew the word. Had he any interest in robbing himself?”
“I can think of none.”
“Well, now I will tell you what interest you had in robbing him.”
M. Patrigent spoke as a man who was convinced of the facts he was about to state; but his assurance was all assumed.
He had relied upon crushing, at a blow, a despairing wretched man, and was nonplussed by seeing him appear as determined upon resistance.
“Will you be good enough to tell me,” he said, in a vexed tone, “how much you have spent during the last year?”
Prosper did not find it necessary to stop to reflect and calculate.
“Yes, monsieur,” he answered, unhesitatingly: “circumstances made it necessary for me to preserve the greatest order in my wild career; I spent about fifty thousand francs.”
“Where did you obtain them?”