astonished and impressed, and the other proceeded with his tale.
"Six months ago Mr. Victor Maréchal was staying in this house, and I had given him No. 7, which is the room next to the one I have to-day given you. He was a charming young fellow, very gay and friendly, and just as fond of roaming in the forest as you are yourself, which ought to be a warning to you, if you'll excuse my saying so. He would be off at ten in the morning and not return till six at night, having had nothing but just a bar of chocolate and a hunch of bread taken with him in his pocket. And if it vexed me that he should miss his midday meal, it was certainly only for his own sake, since he paid me weekly full board at eight francs a day, wine included. But he would come home at six at night, as I have said, hungry as a wolf, and having dined, sipped a liqueur, and smoked a couple of cigarettes, would go to bed and sleep like one of God's blessed saints until the short hand of the clock got round to six again. Then up to sort, and prepare, and classify the plants and insects he had brought in the day before—for he was an entomologist and botanist, was poor Mr. Victor—and so off again.
"Now one night he didn't return, and the rain having come on heavily in the afternoon—it was on the second Friday in October last year that this happened, and the thirteenth of the month too, as my wife afterwards pointed out to me—we supposed he had found himself weather-bound some miles away, and had sought shelter elsewhere. We didn't begin to get uneasy until next day, but when another night passed, and we got no word of him, we naturally set inquiries on foot. All, however, to no purpose. Not a trace of him could be found. Finally, although the authorities took the matter up, nothing definite has been discovered concerning his fate from that day to this.
"To be sure, very strong suspicions are entertained against a certain Leroy and his wife. Young Maréchal was last seen alive by a waggoner, going in at their door. In consequence the couple are this moment in prison at Gex, awaiting their interrogations by the Public Prosecutor. And it is on this account that Mme. Maréchal and her daughter are here, while the gentleman whom you may have observed with them is Maitre Puivert, their advocate, and a nephew by marriage of the old lady's."
"But who are these Leroys?" Raymond wanted to know. "And for what reasons are they suspected of murdering an inoffensive young entomologist?"
Dupont was only too pleased to explain.
"During your wanderings in the forest," said he—"wanderings which, for the future, I should hope, you will not have the temerity to repeat, did you ever happen to come across a miserable little hovel of a dilapidated inn called by the sign of The Friends' Trysting-Place? A singularly inappropriate name surely, for the lair of such bandits as the Leroys! But although they have enjoyed a bad reputation for years, nothing so far has been proved against them. Ha! You do know them, I see?"
For Raymond, with his glass at his lips, suddenly placed it down upon the table, and was leaning forward with animation in his eyes. Yet he answered with assumed indifference.
"I seem to remember such an inn. About five miles to the north-west of this, is it not, a whitewashed house, of two stories, standing back from the road in a sort of little clearing?"
"That's it," Dupont assented, and went on to give details of Leroy's appearance, off the the appearance of his wife, of the stories already current to their discredit, and of the probably motives for the rime, if crime it was.
"Mr. Victor carried his money always about his person in bank-notes. Inadvertently he may have allowed these to be seen. Anyhow, he has been traced to the door of the inn. A wood-cutter has come forward to depose that he observed a young man answering to Maréchal's description enter the house on the night of October the 13th. The Leroys admit that a young man had on that evening dined there. But they insist that he left them, after dinner, in spite of the rain, because the house was fill, and they have produced two persons, waggoners, who have been able to prove that they actually occupied the only two guest-rooms which the inn contained on the night in question."
And Dupont divagated down this channel of surmise and that of suspicion, while Raymond appeared to be giving him his whole attention. But in reality he was listening to another voice, an infinitely more engrossing voice, the voice of memory, which, bit by bit, was bringing back to him every detail of a strange adventure, and of a still stranger dream, which he had experienced while staying in that part of the country, over two years ago.
Two years ago he was tramping through
