"She was sallow, with black hair and bright eyes like beads. She was short and about forty-five years old, though it is difficult to judge of these things. I noticed her hands, for she was taking her gloves off, and they seemed to me to be unusually muscular for a woman."
"Ah!" cried Louis Besnard. "That is important."
"Mme. Dauvray was, as she always was before a seance, in a feverish flutter. 'You will help Mlle. Celie to dress, Helene, and be very quick,' she said; and with an extraordinary longing she added, 'Perhaps we shall see her tonight.' Her, you understand, was Mme. de Montespan." And she turned to the stranger and said, "You will believe, Adele, after tonight."
"Adele!" said the Commissaire wisely. "Then Adele was the strange woman’s name?"
"Perhaps," said Hanaud dryly.
Helene Vauquier reflected.
"I think Adele was the name," she said in a more doubtful tone. "It sounded like Adele."
The irrepressible Mr. Ricardo was impelled to intervene.
"What Monsieur Hanaud means," he explained, with the pleasant air of a man happy to illuminate the dark intelligence of a child, "is that Adele was probably a pseudonym."
Hanaud turned to him with a savage grin.