"Thanks to you. Had you not concealed me on the Vispera, and taken me on that cruise, I should have now been in the hands of the police."
"But they seem to possess no clue," Keppel observed.
"Fortunately for us, they do not," answered the man to whom I had given my heart. And he laughed lightly, as though he were perfectly confident of his own safety. "It was that transfer of the notes at the Carnival ball that puzzled them."
They were speaking of poor Reggie's murder!
I held my ear close to the dividing door, straining to catch every word. I was learning their secret. The two men whom I had least suspected were actually implicated in that dastardly crime. But what, I wondered, could have been their motive in taking the poor boy's life? Certainly robbery was not the incentive, for to old Keppel sixty thousand francs was but a paltry sum.
Again I listened, but as I did so the woman entered, and shortly afterwards the two men left the room and went down the stairs.
In an instant I resolved to follow them. Before they had gained the entrance-hall I had put on my hat and descended. They took a cab and first drove up the hill behind St. Lazare to the Boulevard des Battignolles, alighting before a large house where, from an old concierge in slippers, Ernest received two letters. Both men stood in the doorway and read the communications through. I had followed in a cab. From their faces I could see that the letters contained serious news, and for some minutes they stood in discussion, as though undecided what to do.
At length, however, they re-entered the cab and drove back past the Opera, through the Rue Rivoli and across the Pont des Arts, turning into a labyrinth of narrow, dirty streets beyond the Seine, and stopping before a small, uninviting-looking hairdresser's shop. They were inside for some ten minutes or so, while I stood watching a short distance off, my head turned away so that they should not recognise me if they came out suddenly.
When they emerged they were laughing good-humouredly, and were accompanied to the door by a rather well-dressed man, evidently a hairdresser, for a comb protruded from his pocket, and his hair was brushed up in that style peculiar to the Parisian coiffeur.
"Good-day, messieurs," he said in French, bowing them into the fiacre, "I understand quite clearly. There is nothing to fear, I assure you—absolutely nothing!"