The other men, all the ladies and the children paddling in the sea had come running up. Rénine allowed no one to enter the cabin, except a doctor who was present. But the doctor could only say that M. d'Ormeval was dead, stabbed with a dagger.
At that moment, the mayor and the policeman arrived, together with some people of the village. After the usual enquiries, they carried away the body.
A few persons went on ahead to break the news to Thérèse d'Ormeval, who was once more to be seen on her balcony.
And so the tragedy had taken place without any clue to explain how a man, protected by a closed door with an uninjured lock, could have been murdered in the space of a few minutes and in front of twenty witnesses, one might almost say, twenty spectators. No one had entered the cabin. No one had come out of it. As for the dagger with which M. d'Ormeval had been stabbed between the shoulders, it could not be traced. And all this would have suggested the idea of a trick of sleight-of-hand performed by a clever conjuror, had it not concerned a terrible murder, committed under the most mysterious conditions.
Hortense was unable to follow, as Rénine would have liked, the small party who were making for Madame d'Ormeval; she was paralysed with excitement and incapable of moving. It was the first time that her adventures with Rénine had taken her into the very heart of the action and that, instead of noting the consequences of a murder, or assisting in the pursuit of the criminals, she found herself confronted with the murder itself.
It left her trembling all over; and she stammered: "How horrible!... The poor fellow!... Ah, Rénine, you couldn't save him this time!... And that's what upsets me more than anything, that we could and should have saved him, since we knew of the plot...."
Rénine made her sniff at a bottle of salts; and when she had quite recovered her composure, he said, while observing her attentively:
"So you think that there is some connection between the murder and the plot which we were trying to frustrate?"
"Certainly," said she, astonished at the question.