right. Honestly, my chief reason for not taking the chance was the Countess Rosalie—I didn't want to mix her up in it. She had been a little trump, and the French police are always ready to grab a scapegoat. There's a bit of the Chinese theory about French criminal procedure. Somebody ought to suffer, if only to preserve the reputation of the police. Punish the guilty by preference, but punish somebody. As a matter of fact, the guilty party, or supposedly guilty party, usually gets off in the end unless he's a fairly honest sort of cove; but there's a lot of trouble about it all the same, and I didn't want to chuck it on my bright-eyed Rosalie. I was getting rather keen about Rosalie.
Anyway, Chu-Chu walked past me unhurt, and maybe he felt that there was a heap of trouble in the atmosphere, for his little smile showed the white of two fangs that might be useful to a collie, and his eyes were dancing. He may have looked at me; I don't know, because when he got close my own eyes were frozen on an Ave Maria. One spark would have blown up the magazine, and I wasn't taking any more chances than were strictly necessary. Something told me that from the moment that Chu-Chu's eyes and mine actually met any disguise under heaven would be about as effective as a tulle gown in front of an X-ray machine.
Off we went again, Chu-Chu well in the lead and a car or two between us. He was across the bridge at St. Cloud before we had reached it, but we caught a glimpse of him as he swung round the corner to start up the hill on the road to Versailles. At the
