"Not mad, my poor boy? Yet perhaps you were mad—then?" Then he stopped abruptly. "Don't let us go over all that again! I forbid it absolutely." He leaned back on his writing-table, folded his arms and asked sternly: "Have you come here only to tell me that?"
The curt question seemed to affect the lad strangely. All his former audacity dropped from him. Nervously he stammered:
"I can't remain a woman any longer!"
"Why not?" snapped Etienne Rambert.
"I can't."
The two men looked at each other in silence, as if trying to read one another's thoughts. Then Etienne Rambert seemed to see the inner meaning of the words his son had just said.
"I see!" he answered slowly. "I understand.... The Royal Palace Hotel, where Mlle. Jeanne held a trusted post, has just been the scene of a daring robbery. Obviously, if anyone could prove that Charles Rambert and the new cashier were one and the same person——"
But the young fellow understood the insinuation and burst out:
"I did not commit that robbery!"
"You did!" Etienne Rambert insisted: "you did. I read the newspaper accounts of the robbery, read them with all the agony that only a father like me with a son like you could feel. The detectives and the magistrates were at a loss to find the key to the mystery, but I saw clearly and at once what the solution of the mystery was. And I knew and understood because I knew it was—you!"