“He kept on dazzling us with the light of his lantern. All that I could say is that he is tall and heavily built.”
“Is that how he appeared to you, mademoiselle?” asked the magistrate, turning to Suzanne de Gesvres.
“Yes—or, rather, no,” said Suzanne, reflecting. “I thought he was about the middle height and slender.”
M. Filleul smiled; he was accustomed to differences of opinion and sight in witnesses to one and the same fact:
“So we have to do, on the one hand, with a man, the one in the drawing room, who is, at the same time, tall and short, stout and thin, and, on the other, with two men, those in the park, who are accused of removing from that drawing room objects—which are still here!”
M. Filleul was a magistrate of the ironic school, as he himself would say. He was also a very ambitious magistrate and one who did not object to an audience nor to an occasion to display his tactful resource in public, as was shown by the increasing number of persons who now crowded into the room. The journalists had been joined by the farmer and his son, the gardener and his wife, the indoor servants of the château and the two cabmen who had driven the flies from Dieppe.
M. Filleul continued:
“There is also the question of agreeing upon the way in which the third person disappeared. Was this the gun you fired, mademoiselle, and from this window?”
“Yes. The man reached the tombstone which is almost buried under the brambles, to the left of the cloisters.”
“But he got up again?”