The voice put them on the same level—made them allies against the dead. In its soft, gentle rise and fall, in the dark sympathetic eyes and clean, aquiline face there was something approaching hypnotic power, as several ladies of Bordeaux knew. She began to feel a strange sensation of rest and comfort and vaguely wished that he would go on. M. Feverel's trained eye caught the all but imperceptible relaxation of the rigid figure. A thrill of triumph ran through him. He was winning! But there was no sign of elation or impatience in his voice or words when he continued.
He begged her not to think that the machinery of the law was directed against her. Justice was not blind. She was clear-sighted. She was not sternly even-handed, but more frequently merciful. She had long since forgotten the bitter law of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. She could make allowances for the frailty of humanity. She could understand that there might be many circumstances under which an assassination might be justifiable. Nay, more—when it became a duty to kill!
Twice when he paused, Jacqueline's lips trembled and her eyes looked into his with yearning. She seemed about to speak, but her lips closed firmly and her glance sought the window, without a word uttered.
Suddenly he rang a bell and a policeman appeared at the door.
"Remove the prisoner!" he commanded in a harsh, curt tone that fell on the woman like the blow of a whip. She hesitated and half-extended her hand as if to stop him and once more the magistrate thought that he had triumphed. But the impulse was conquered and she passed out of his office without having uttered a word.
M. Valmorin returned and in reply to his questioning look, the magistrate shook his head.
"She would not speak," he said, wearily. M. Valmorin's interest as an expert was aroused, and with the magistrate he went over the examination in detail. M. Feverel told him the impression that he had made once or twice and expressed the fear that she would never be forced to tell her story.
"You can see, my friend," he said, "that she is addicted to the use of drugs. She has now been without anything of the sort for forty-eight hours. That means that her nerves must be in a bad shape, and it also means that she has an iron will to conceal the fact so determinedly and foil the examination."
M. Feverel's prophecy proved true.
In the first few hours of her arrest Jacqueline's instinct told, her she would be helpless in a verbal duel with these trained men of the law. An apparently aimless question and a careless answer might be the combination to open the locked gates of her past and then she would have killed Laroque in vain. So, as the days passed and the examinations followed each other with nerve-wracking persistency, she wept, shrieked, and groaned for hours in her cell, begging for ether or morphine, but not a word of her story could be forced from her.