"Through whom?"
"Through the papers," exclaimed Don Luis. "And, more certainly still, through Mlle. Levasseur."
"Through the papers?" said Sauverand. "I never used to read them. What! Is that incredible? Are we under an obligation, an inevitable necessity, to waste half an hour a day in skimming through the futilities of politics and the piffle of the news columns? Is your imagination incapable of conceiving a man who reads nothing but reviews and scientific publications?
"The fact is rare, I admit," he continued. "But the rarity of a fact is no proof against it. On the other hand, on the very morning of the crime I had written to Florence saying that I was going away for three weeks and bidding her good-bye. I changed my mind at the last moment; but this she did not know; and, thinking that I had gone, not knowing where I was, she was unable to inform me of the crime, of Marie's arrest, or, later, when an accusation was brought against the man with the ebony walking-stick, of the search that was being made for me."
"Exactly!" declared Don Luis. "You cannot pretend that the man with the ebony walking-stick, the man who followed Inspector Vérot to the Café du Pont-Neuf and purloined his letter"
"I am not the man," Sauverand interrupted.
And, when Don Luis shrugged his shoulders, he insisted, in a more forcible tone of voice:
"I am not that man. There is some inexplicable mistake in all this, but I have never set foot in the Café du Pont-Neuf. I swear it. You must accept this statement as positively true. Besides, it agrees entirely with the
