“I tell you I saw the thing with my own eyes! He must have carried the body away and hidden it!”
“Hush! ma petite,” said the man, soothingly. “Go home: it will be all right to-morrow!”
“I won’t go home. I am quite in my senses, and it will be your fault if that man escapes. You ought to do your duty and arrest him. I shall complain to the Maire! Where does he live? I must see him! Take me there at once.”
“C’est impossible!” replied the officer, coldly; “but Madame will find that I will do my duty,” he added, meaningly.
“I must see the Maire! The murderer will escape!” went on the governess, hysterically.
The sergent de ville placed her arm firmly within his own.
“Madame will come with me,” he said, and he led her away.
He was not going to wake up the Maire or Juge de Paix at that late hour of the night, or rather early hour of the morning, with such a cock and a bull story from a drunken woman. Why, he might lose his promotion should he disturb the slumbers of his superiors!
Finding, therefore, that his entreaties for her to go home were treated only as deaf words, and that she would neither go herself nor tell where she lived, the astute officer conducted her carefully to the guard-house, under the plea of showing her where the Maire lived in order to get her along quietly, and had her comfortably locked up.
The tables were turned with a vengeance! Markworth had got off scot free; and here was Clara Kingscott locked up in a police-station for the night as a disorderly character! Some allowance must be made, however, for the sergent de ville. Her story was so improbable, and she looked so strange and talked so excitedly, that the mistake might have been made even by one of our very bright and intelligent guardians of the peace, who never make such mistakes as, say, locking up a dying man perhaps on the charge of inebriety!