brought back to hear it after his wife's removal to the cells, he, believing that she had betrayed him, fell into such red fury, and swore such horrible oaths that he would do for her when he got out, that he had to be gagged and manacled.
He never, however, got out, for the charge was proved convincingly. The stable floor was taken up and the body of the victim discovered, as well as the bones of another unknown previous victim which had lain there for apparently four or five years. Leroy finished his career on the scaffold. His wife, the more guilty of the two, has also the harder doom, for she still lives in the convict prison for women at Noirlieu.
These events, of course, followed later.
The rest of the day on which Raymond had brought home the crime to its perpetrators was spent in animated discussion of the extraordinary means by which he had been enabled to do so. As he and Puivert were on their way back to Etréport the barrister could talk of nothing but the dream which he had heard for the first time narrated by Raymond before they left the court-house.
"Do you suppose that they intended to murder you too?" he queried.
"I have never been able to decide. Did I frustrate their plans by my barricade at the cupboard-door, or did I merely dream the attempted entrance, as I certainly dreamed the accomplished crime?"
"Then, again, was it a dream of premonition?" debated Puivert. "Was it my poor cousin whom you foresaw in the bed? Or was it the spirit of the earlier victim still haunting the place, and communicating itself to your spirit?"
"Or mightn't it simply be that the evil intentions brooding in the Leroys' own minds, their mental rehearsal of the already familiar procedure, radiated out and entered my mind," Raymond suggested, "as the wireless message enters the receiver? In these days of wireless telegraphy, of the Röntgen rays, and of the still more wonderful Becquerel rays, I don't see how we are going to deny the possibility of telepathy too."
"Oh, we live in a world of marvellous possibilities," Puivert conceded. "And no one can say what hitherto undiscovered powers and properties are not lying close at hand. Indeed, the sum total of what we know, compared to all that is knowable, about equals, I suppose, the chicken's knowledge of the poultry-yard before he has chipped his way out of the shell!"
Raymond sat wrapped in thought, and Puivert confidently expected something stimulating and abstruse to be contributed to the subject. But when he did speak it was with surprising irrelevancy.
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"RAYMOND SAT WRAPPED IN THOUGHT."
"Do you think," said he, "that Mlle. Léonie will ever recover her good spirits?"
Puivert was intensely disappointed, yet bore up gallantly.
"You and I will help my cousin to recover them," said he; and it would appear that Raymond's thought did here radiate out into the other's mind, for Maitre Puivert received at that moment a clear mental picture of the not distant day when this pleasant-faced young Englishman would be able to claim him as cousin too.
