"Aha!" said Sernine. "I expected it, after your note of this morning. But, all the same, the poor beggar has not been long. . . ."
"He was wasted to a shadow. A fainting-fit; and it was all over."
"Did he not speak?"
"No."
"Are you sure that, from the day when the two of us picked him up under the table in that low haunt at Belleville, are you sure that nobody in your nursing-home suspected that he was the Pierre Leduc whom the police were looking for, the mysterious Pierre Leduc whom Mr. Kesselbach was trying to find at all costs?"
"Nobody. He had a room to himself. Moreover, I bandaged up his left hand so that the injury to the little finger could not be seen. As for the scar on the cheek, it is hidden by the beard."
"And you looked after him yourself?"
"Myself. And, according to your instructions, I took the opportunity of questioning him whenever he seemed at all clear in his head. But I could never get more than an inarticulate stammering out of him."
The prince muttered thoughtfully:
"Dead! . . . So Pierre Leduc is dead? . . . The whole Kesselbach case obviously turned on him, and now he disappears . . . without a revelation, without a word about himself, about his past. . . . Ought I to embark on this adventure, in which I am still entirely in the dark? It's dangerous. . . . I may come to grief. . . ."