"In spite of what I have said to you? It is a warning; you know it well!"
"In spite of your warning!"
"Take care!" M. Ginory softly said. His angry face had lost its wonted amiability. The registrar quickly raised his head. He felt that a decisive moment had come. The Examining Magistrate looked directly into Dantin's eyes and slowly said: "You remember that you were seen by the portress at the moment when Rovère, standing with you in front of his open safe, showed you some valuables?"
Dantin waited a moment before he replied, as if measuring these words, and searching to find out just what M. Ginory was driving at. This silence, short and momentous, was dramatic. The Magistrate knew it well—that moment of agony when the question seems like a cord, like a lasso suddenly thrown, and tightening around one's neck. There was always, in his examination, a tragic moment.
"I remember very well that I saw a person whom I did not know enter the room where I was with M. Rovère," Jacques Dantin replied at last.
"A person whom you did not know? You knew her very well, since you had more than once asked her if M. Rovère was at home. That person is Mme. Moniche, who has made her deposition."
"And what did she say in her deposition?"
The Magistrate took a paper from the table in front of him and read: "When I entered, M. Rovère was standing before his safe, and I noticed that the individual of whom I spoke (the individual is you) cast upon the coupons a look which made me cold. I thought to myself: 'This man looks as if he is meditating some bad deed.'"
"That is to say," brusquely said Dantin, who had listened with frowning brows and with an angry expression, "that Mme. Moniche accuses me of having murdered M. Rovère!"
"You are in too much haste. Mme. Moniche has not said that precisely. She was only surprised—surprised and frightened—at your expression as you looked at the deeds, bills and coupons."