Bregeac snapped: “Try to behave yourself, Marescal.” At once Marescal put him in his place. “It’s no use, Bregeac; shut up!” he said. “Your weakness is that you don’t know the weapons I hold against Mademoiselle, and consequently against you. Perhaps, when you do know them, you’ll realize that it’s your duty to do as you’re told.” Facing one another, drawn to their full height, the two enemies tried to stare one another down. Their hate for one another, springing from opposing ambitions, warring instincts, and above all from a rivalry in love that all these other factors made more bitter, was equal. Beside them Aurelie waited, sitting upright on her chair. The curious thing was, and it struck Marescal, that she seemed to have recovered herself. Still feeble, with drawn face, she no longer wore, as at the beginning of the attack, her air of a helpless, exhausted quarry. She maintained that rigid attitude which he had observed her assume on the bench at Sainte-Marie. Her eyes, open wide, wet with tears which trickled down her pale cheeks, were fixed on something invisible to either of them. Of what was she thinking? Sometimes from the very bottom of the abyss one rises again. Did she think that he, Marescal, could be moved to pity? Had she a plan of defense which would allow her to escape the penalty of the law? He banged his fist down on the table and cried: “We’ll see about that!” Leaving the girl out of it for the moment, he gave all his attention to Bregeac. He stepped right up to him, thrusting his face forward, so that his chief had to recoil a step, and said to him: “It won’t take me long to deal with you. The facts and only the facts! Some of them are known to you, Bregeac, as they are known to everybody; but to the majority of them there is no witness but me, or rather they have been discovered by me alone. Do not try to deny them; I am giving them to you exactly as they are, in all their simplicity. Here they are in the form of an indictment. On the 26th of April last——” Bregeac quivered, and said quickly: “The twenty-sixth of April was the day on which we met on the Boulevard Haussmann.” “Yes; and it was the day on which your step-daughter left you,” said Marescal, and he added sharply: “It was also the day on which three persons were murdered on the Marseilles express.” “What? What connection is there between the two facts?” asked Bregeac in astonished accents. “Don’t be impatient,” said Marescal pompously. “You will get each fact in its place, in its chronological order.” He paused to cough. Then went on: “On April the twenty-sixth, car number five, in the express, was occupied by only four persons. In the last compartment were an English girl of the name of Miss Bakersfield—a crook she was—and Baron de Limézy, a pretended explorer. In the last compartment were two men, the brothers Loubeaux, residing at Neuilly-sur-Seine.