"Notice that I attribute no exaggerated importance to these proofs. It is not on them alone that I base the accusation. But they constitute a strange witness, very disquieting in its mute eloquence. They add to the doubt which your desire for silence has awakened. You tell me that you were not near Rovère when he died. These proofs, irrefutable as a fact, seem to prove at once the contrary. Then, the day Rovère was assassinated where were you?"
"I do not know. At home, without doubt. I will have to think it over. At what hour was Rovère killed?"
M. Ginory made a gesture of ignorance and in a tone of raillery said: "That! There are others who know it better than I." And Dantin, irritated, looked at him.
"Yes," went on the Magistrate, with mocking politeness, "the surgeons who can tell the hour in which he was killed." He turned over his papers. "The assassination was about an hour before midday. In Paris, in broad daylight, at that hour, a murder was committed!"
"At that hour," said Jacques Dantin, "I was just leaving home."
"To go where?"
"For a walk. I had a headache. I was going to walk in the Champs-Elysées to cure it."
"And did you, in your walk, meet any one whom you knew?"
"No one."
"Did you go into some shop?"