"You saw him?" cried Ernest. "You actually saw him coming from the room?"
"Yes. Instantly, I suspected something wrong, and wondered for what purpose he had been in the ladies' sitting-room. Therefore, without hesitation, I pushed open the door and looked inside. Imagine my surprise when I found the unfortunate man writhing in agony upon the ground. I knelt by him, but recognising me as the woman at whose house he had been cheated, he shrank from me. 'That man!' he gasped with difficulty. 'That man has killed me!' and a few moments later his limbs straightened themselves out in a final paroxysm of agony, and he passed away."
Mrs. Thorne burst into a flood of tears.
The tow-haired woman was silent for a moment, her eyes fixed upon the face of the man against whom she had uttered that terrible denunciation.
"I stood there terrified—unable to move," she went on. "Laumont had, as I anticipated, killed him."
"Killed him? How can you prove it?" demanded the cunning card-sharper, Vauquelin, who had tricked me so cleverly, and who, in order to throw the police off the scent, pursued the harmless calling of hairdresser in that back street off the Boulevard St. Michel. Apparently he was the Corsican's champion. "How can you prove that Jean Laumont killed him?"
CHAPTER XXVIII
REVEALS THE TRUTH
The woman Fournereau crossed the room quickly to a small rosewood bureau, and took therefrom a little cardboard box about a couple of inches square, such as is often used for containing cheap jewellery.
"I have something here," she said, addressing the man before her, "which was lying on the floor. You alone know its secret—a secret which I, too, have lately discovered."