"I have nothing left in this world to love but you," she said, piteously addressing the cockatoo.
"J'ai bien des chos's au Mont-d'-Piété," replied the bird.
It was one o'clock by the time Mr. Heathcote and Monsieur Drubarde left the dressmaker's apartment, so the Englishman suggested a light luncheon at the Restaurant Lapérouse, within a stone's throw of Drubarde's apartment; and the suggestion being received favourably by the ex-policeman, they were soon afterwards seated at a little table, in a private room with a window overlooking the river, ready to do justice to the plat du jour, a fricandeau aux épinards, and to a bottle of Mouton-Rothschild. The wine-bibbing at the dressmaker's apartment had been merely a benevolent excuse for providing the spinster with a little good Bordeaux.
"Now, Monsieur Drubarde, we are alone and at our ease. You have now all the facts of Léonie Lemarque's death well within your knowledge; and it is for you to give me your opinion."
"A very difficult case in which to come to a decided opinion," answered Drubarde. "At present my conclusions and yours are antagonistic. My niece wrote out a careful translation of your newspaper report. I have her translation in my pocket-book. You can look it over if you like, to see that it is faithfully done. I have read it three or four times, with keenest attention, and I can so far see nothing out of the common in Léonie Lemarque's fate. A pretty girl travelling alone, a common ruffian, a common murder."
"And you see no link between this crime and that former murder?"
"Not a thread—not a hair. A deed done ten years ago—unpunished, the murderer undiscovered."
"Do you forget that Léonie went to London with credentials to a friend of this very murderer? Perhaps a friend so devoted, so bound to the guilty man, that he might not stop at murder to get rid of the one witness of his friend's crime."
"To imagine that is to imagine an impossible friendship. Men do not risk their necks nowadays, whatever they may have done in the time of Damon and Pythias."
"Then you see nothing extraordinary or mysterious in the violent death of this girl, within twenty-four hours of her leaving Paris, carrying with her documents which may, in some manner, have betrayed the secret of the double murder. Perhaps a letter from the lover to his mistress, a letter written by a man maddened by jealousy, threatening to do the deed which was afterwards done. You see no sufficient ground for connecting one crime with the other, for seeking the secret of the second crime in the history of the first."