"The offer is a fair one, but I do not seek your money. We have two hours in which to save her, but before I go with you, you shall swear to me that anything I may tell you will never be used against me here or in any other country."
"Of course," said I; "you don't think I am a policeman, do you? I have no other interest but that of the lady."
"Nor I," said he; and he followed me into the café, but the place was so intolerably full that I bade him come with me to a little wine-shop in the Rue Lafayette, and there we found a vacant table, and I ordered his absinthe and a glass of coffee for myself. Scarcely, however, had he lighted his cigarette before he began to talk of the matter we had come upon.
"First," said he, "tell me, did Mademoiselle speak of a letter she had received?"
"She not only spoke of it, but she gave it to me to read," I replied.
"Well," said he, "I wrote it."
"I gathered that from your words," said I next; "and of course you wrote it for very good reasons?"
"You shall hear them," said he, sipping freely of his drink. "That bracelet was last worn at the Mi-Carême Ball in Marseilles by a girl named Berthe Duval. She was carried from the ball-room stabbed horribly, at one o'clock in the morning. She died in my arms, for in one week she was to have been my wife."
"And the assassin?" I asked.
"Was hunted for by the police in vain," he continued. "I myself offered every shilling that I had to find him, but, despite the activity of us all, he was never so much as named. Let us go back another year—it is painful enough for me because such a retrogression recalls to me the one passion of my life—a passion beside which the affair at Marseilles is not to be spoken of. God knows that the memory of the woman I refer to is at this moment eating out my heart. She was an Italian girl, sixteen years old when she died, and I think—why should I not?—that the world has never held a more beautiful creature. Well, she wore the bracelet, now about twenty-six months ago, at the Mardi Gras Ball in Savona, and she fell dead before my very eyes ten minutes after she had entered the ball-room. She had drunk of poisoned coffee, and no man but one knew by whose hand the death had come to her."