Shears loved this dry, claptrap way of announcing his triumphs.
As a matter of fact, the baron and his wife seemed stupefied and looked at him with a silent curiosity which was, in itself, the highest praise.
He next summed up in detail all that he had done during those three days. He told how he had discovered the picture-book, wrote down on a sheet of paper the sentence formed by the letters which had been cut out, then described Bresson's expedition to the bank of the Seine and his suicide and, lastly, the struggle in which he, Shears, had just been engaged with Lupin, the wreck of the boat and Lupin's disappearance.
When he had finished, the baron said, in a low voice:
"Nothing remains but that you should reveal the name of the thief. Whom do you accuse?"
"I accuse the person who cut out the letters from this alphabet and communicated, by means of those letters, with Arsène Lupin."
"How do you know that this person's correspondent was Arsène Lupin?"
"From Lupin himself."
He held out a scrap of moist and crumpled paper. It was the page which Lupin had torn from his note-book in the boat, and on which he had written the sentence.
"And observe," said Shears, in a gratified voice, "that there was nothing to compel him to give me this paper and thus make himself known. It was a mere schoolboy prank on his part, which gave me the information I wanted."