Things took on a truly disagreeable aspect; he began to suspect a cleverly laid trap. There was danger in the house. From what side did it threaten? How could he admit that an attack could take place when he had taken every possible precaution? “If Bregeac moves, all the worse for him—a bullet through his head,” he said to Sauvinoux. He went to the door and opened it. He could hear the murmur of the voices of Tony and Labonce. He leaned over the bannisters and called out: “Is everything right down there, Tony? Has any one come in?” “No one, Chief. Did you have a row upstairs?” said Tony. “No—no—Besides, Sauvinoux is with me,” said Marescal. More and more uneasy in mind, he returned quickly to the study. Bregeac, Sauvinoux, and the girl had not stirred. Only,—only—an unheard of, incredible, unimaginable, fantastic phenomenon, which paralyzed his legs and held him unable to stir in the frame of the doorway, met his eye: Sauvinoux had an unlighted cigarette between his lips and was looking at him in the manner of one asking for a light. A nightmarish vision, in such violent opposition to reality that Marescal at first refused to admit to himself its obvious meaning. Sauvinoux, owing to some aberration for which he would be punished, wished to smoke and was asking for a light—that was all. Why look any further? But little by little the face of Sauvinoux was lighted up by a mocking smile in which there was so much mischief and impertinent bonhommie that Marescal tried vainly to shut his eyes to it. It could not be that Sauvinoux, his subordinate Sauvinoux, was little by little becoming in spirit a new creature who was no longer Sauvinoux, no longer a policeman, but on the contrary was crossing over to the camp of the enemy. Sauvinoux? it was—— In the ordinary course of his profession Marescal would have put up a longer fight against such a monstrous fact. But the most fantastic happenings seemed to him quite natural when it was a matter of the man whom he called “the man of the express.” Though he refused to utter, even in the depths of his heart, the irrevocable admission and submit to the truly hateful reality, how could he escape the evidence of his eyes? How could he fail to realize that Sauvinoux, the admirable assistant whom the Minister had recommended to him a week before, was no other than that infernal personage whom he had arrested that morning and who was at the moment actually at the Police Headquarters in the office set aside for Bertillon measurement. “Tony!” howled the Commissary, dashing out of the room a second time. “Tony! Labonce! Come up at once, dammit!” He had shouted at the top of his voice; he was dancing about and banging the bannisters, for all the world like a cat on hot bricks. His men came running upstairs. He stuttered: “Sauvinoux! D-D-Do you know who he is? It’s the b-b-beggar we—we—arrested this m-m-morning—escaped! Disguised!” Tony and Labonce stared at him, aghast: the chief had gone off his head!