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“Murdered!… The baroness!… But you’re mad!”

“Murdered … and probably that same evening.”

“I tell you again, you are mad! How can the baroness have been murdered, when the police are following her tracks, so to speak, step by step?”

“They are following the tracks of another woman.”

“What woman?”

“The murderer’s accomplice.”

“And who is the murderer?”

“The same man who, for the last fortnight, knowing that Lavernoux, through the situation which he occupied in this house, had discovered the truth, kept him imprisoned, forced him to silence, threatened him, terrorized him; the same man who, finding Lavernoux in the act of communicating with a friend, made away with him in cold blood by stabbing him to the heart.”

“The doctor, therefore?”

“Yes.”

“But who is this doctor? Who is this malevolent genius, this infernal being who appears and disappears, who slays in the dark and whom nobody suspects?”

“Can’t you guess?”

“No.”

“And do you want to know?”

“Do I want to know?… Why, speak, man, speak!… You know where he is hiding?”