"You say no man but one; that one was——"
"Myself!"
"Then you knew who killed the other victim at Marseilles?"
"I knew, as you say; but to know and to arrest are different things."
"Have you any idea as to the man's whereabouts now?"
"Every idea; he was in Paris three days ago—he was in Paris to-day. I should judge it more than likely that he will be at the Opera Ball to-night."
Before he could say more I rose from my chair and summoned the head waiter of the place to me. Then I wrote an urgent message upon a leaf of my note-book, and despatched it by a cab to 32, Rue Boissière. The message implored Mademoiselle Bernier, as she valued her life, to leave the bracelet at home for this night at any rate.
"Now," said I, "we can talk still at our leisure. You have taken me back to Marseilles fourteen months ago; let us have the chapter in your life which precedes that one."
He finished off his absinthe, and called for another glass before he would answer me. At last he said,—
"You ask me to speak of things which I would well forget. I have sufficient confidence in you, however, to trust my safety in your hands. The story is not a long one. Three years ago I was a struggling painter in Savona, giving half my life to a study of the pictures in the cathedral—you may know the work of Antonio Semini there—and the other half to the worship of Pauline di Chigi, the daughter of a silversmith who lives over against the Hotel Royal. Needless to tell you of my poverty, or of my belief in myself. I lived then in the day-dreams which come at the seed-time of art; they were broken only by the waywardness of the girl, by her womanly fickleness, by the riches of the men who sought her. It would weary you to hear of my long nights of agony following the momentary success of this man or that who wooed her, of my curses upon my own poverty, of my bitterness, and sometimes even of my hopelessness. There is something of this sort in the life of every poor man, but the romance will scarce bear the light of other eyes; it has a place in my story only in so far as it prompted me to steal the topaz, if stealing is the word for the act which gave me its possession.