"It was between five and six in the afternoon, on the day before the Thursday when we arrived here, at the Château d'Ornequin?"
"Yes, but why these questions?"
"Why? Look at this, Paul. I took from you and I hold in my hand the splinter of shell which you removed from the wall of the lodge at the exact spot where Élisabeth was shot. Here it is. There was a lock of hair still sticking to it."
"Well?"
"Well, I had a talk just now with an adjutant of artillery, who was passing by the château; and the result of our conversation and of his inspection was that the splinter does not belong to a shell fired from a 75-centimeter gun, but to a shell fired from a 155-centimeter gun, a Rimailho."
"I don't understand."
"You don't understand, because you don't know or because you have forgotten what my adjutant reminded me of. On the Corvigny day, Wednesday the sixteenth, the batteries which opened fire and dropped a few shells on the château at the moment when the execution was taking place were all batteries of seventy-fives; and our one-five-five Rimailhos did not fire until the next day, Thursday, while we were marching against the château. Therefore, as Élisabeth was shot and buried at about 6 o'clock on the Wednesday evening, it is physically impossible for a splinter of a shell fired from a Rimailho to have taken off a lock of her hair, because the Rimailhos were not fired until the Thursday morning."
"Then you mean to say. . . ." murmured Paul, in a husky voice.
"I mean to say, how can we doubt that the Rimailho splinter was picked up from the ground on the Thursday morning and deliberately driven into the wall among some locks of hair cut off on the evening before?"
"But you're crazy, Bernard! What object can there have been in that?"