"I see in this the same extraordinary audacity, the same certainty of escape, the same long and careful preparation, for it is a by no means convenient place for a burglary in open day: comings and goings are perpetual, and the guilty persons ran a hundred risks of being caught...." Fandor interrupted his reflections to read Elizabeth's letter once more. "She is dying of fright! That is evident!... In any case she calls to me for help. Her letter was posted yesterday evening.... I will go and see her--and at once.... Who knows but I might find some clue which would put me on the right track?" * * * * * Jerome Fandor did not feel very hopeful. After having gone carefully over every point connected with, and pertaining to, the affair of rue du Quatre Septembre, he had almost come to the conclusion, optimistic as he was regarding the police, that chance alone would bring about the arrest of the guilty parties. "To lay these criminals by the heels," he had frankly declared, "requires the aid of very favourable circumstances, and without them, neither I nor the police will get at the truth of it all." Fandor made a definite distinction between the opinion of the police and his own, because two different theories now obtained with regard to the two affairs: that of the attack on the Princess Sonia Danidoff, and that of the robbery of rue du Quatre Septembre, where the imprints of Jacques Dollon's fingers had been found. The police and Fandor coupled Monsieur Havard with Monsieur Bertillon under this definition; the police held it for certain that Jacques Dollon was alive, very much alive, and the probabilities were great that he was guilty of the different crimes attributed to him. In an interview granted to a press rival of _La Capitale_ Monsieur Bertillon had stated: "We base our assertion that Dollon is alive, and consequently guilty, on material facts: we have found his signature attached to each of the crimes, and it is a signature which cannot be imitated by anyone...." For his part, Fandor held it as certain that Jacques was dead. "I maintain that, since fifty persons have seen Jacques Dollon dead, it is infinitely more likely that he is dead than that he is alive! The imprints of his fingers, his hand, are equally visible, it is true, and seem to prove that he is alive. But the conclusive nature of this test is nullified by the fact that, before the discovery of these imprints, before these imprints had been made, Jacques Dollon was dead!" And in his articles in _La Capitale_, Jerome Fandor, with a persistency which finished by disconcerting even the most convinced partisans of the police contention, continued to maintain that Jacques Dollon was dead, dead as dead, and, to use his own expression, "as dead as it was possible for anyone to be dead!" Jerome Fandor had just rung the bell at the garden gate of Madame Bourrat's private boarding-house in Auteuil.