He replied:
"Sergeant Mazeroux went to sleep in his chair and did not wake until Mme. Fauville returned, two hours later."
There was a fresh silence, which evidently meant:
"So, during the two hours when Sergeant Mazeroux was asleep, it was physically possible for you to open the door and kill the two Fauvilles."
The examination was taking the course which Perenna had foreseen; and the circle was drawing closer and closer around him. His adversary was conducting the contest with a logic and vigour which he admired without reserve.
"By Jove!" he thought. "How difficult it is to defend one's self when one is innocent. There's my right wing and my left wing driven in. Will my centre be able to stand the assault?"
M. Desmalions, after a whispered colloquy with the examining magistrate, resumed his questions in these terms:
"Yesterday evening, when M. Fauville opened his safe in your presence and the sergeant's, what was in the safe?"
"A heap of papers, on one of the shelves; and, among those papers, the diary in drab cloth which has since disappeared."
"You did not touch those papers?"
"Neither the papers nor the safe, Monsieur le Préfet. Sergeant Mazeroux must have told you that he made me stand aside, to insure the regularity of the inquiry."
"So you never came into the slightest contact with the safe?"
"Not the slightest."
