“Yes. You’ll still see his name engraved on the brass plate on the door, ‘Loubeaux Frères, et Jodot’,” said the proprietor of the restaurant. Ralph started again. “Jodot?” he said in incredulous accents. “Yes—a big, red-faced man who looks like a strong man at a fair. No one has seen him about here for more than a year.” Most important information, as Ralph told himself, when the proprietor hurried to welcome a regular customer. So Jodot had formerly been the partner of the two brothers whom he was to murder later. There was nothing astonishing in the fact that the police had not gone carefully into this matter, for they had never suspected that there had been any Jodot concerned in the crime, since Marescal had made up his mind that Ralph was the third confederate of the murderers. But why did Jodot return to the very place where his victims had formerly lived? And why did Bregeac spy upon his coming? The week passed uneventfully. Jodot did not appear again in front of Bregeac’s house. But on the Saturday Ralph, convinced that he would return to the villa on the Sunday, climbed over the wall of its garden from the piece of waste land which ran along it and made his way into the villa itself through a window on the first floor. Two of the rooms on this floor were still furnished; and there were signs that they had been carefully searched. Who had searched them? The Police? Bregeac? Jodot? With what object? Ralph did not search them himself. That which some one else had sought, was either not to be found there, or was to found there no longer. He settled down to spend the night in an easy chair. He found a book lying on the table and began to read it by the light of his electric torch. It sent him to sleep. The truth is only revealed to those who compel it to emerge from the darkness; and it often happens that, when one believes it to be a long way off, chance comes and sets it in the very place one has prepared for it. One’s merit consists in the quality of that preparation. On awaking, Ralph’s eyes fell on the book he had been reading. Its cover had been again covered with a piece of cloth cut out of one of those squares of black cloth which photographers use to cover their cameras. Ralph hunted about. In a corner of a cupboard, devoted apparently to odds and ends, he found one of those very squares of cloth. Three round pieces of about the size of a plate had been cut out of it. “Here we are!” he said to himself in some excitement. “I am in luck! The three masks of the train-robbers came from this house! Here is the irrefutable proof of it. It does throw a lot of light on the affair.” The truth now appeared to him so natural, so exactly in keeping with the unexpressed intuitions he had had, and to a certain extent so entertaining in its simplicity, that he laughed aloud in that silent house.