"Perhaps I ought to have spoken at once. I had not the courage, in memory of my old friend Kesselbach, whose name she bore.
"And then I was afraid. . . . On the day when I unmasked her, at the Palais de Justice, I read my doom in her eyes.
"Will my weakness save me?"
"Him also," thought Lupin, "him also she killed! . . . Why, of course, he knew too much! . . . The initials . . . that name, Letitia . . . the secret habit of smoking!"
And he remembered the previous night, that smell of tobacco in her room.
He continued his inspection of the first pocket-book. There were scraps of letters, in cipher, no doubt handed to Dolores by her accomplices, in the course of their nocturnal meetings. There were also addresses on bits of paper, addresses of milliners and dressmakers, but addresses also of low haunts, of common hotels. . . . And names . . . twenty, thirty names . . . queer names: Hector the Butcher, Armand of Grenelle, the Sick Man . . .
But a photograph caught Lupin's eye. He looked at it. And, at once, as though shot from a spring, dropping the pocket-book, he bolted out of the room, out of the chalet and rushed into the park.
He had recognized the portrait of Louis de Malreich, the prisoner at the Santé!
Not till then, not till that exact moment did he remember: the execution was to take place next day.
And, as the man in black, as the murderer was none other than Dolores Kesselbach, Louis de Malreich's name was really and truly Leon Massier and he was innocent!