Boirac, he conjectured, must have discovered his wife has eloped with Felix. Mad with jealousy and hatred he kills her. Then, cooling down somewhat, he finds himself with the body on his hands. What is he to do with it? He thinks of the cask standing in the study. He sees that a better receptacle for getting the body out of the house could hardly be devised. He therefore unpacks the statue and puts in the body. The question then arises, where is he to send it? A horrible idea occurs to him. He will wreak his vengeance on Felix by sending it to him. And then a second idea strikes him. If he could arrange that the police would find the body in Felix’s possession, would the artist not then be suspected and perhaps executed? Truly a ghastly vengeance! Boirac then types the Le Gautier letter, and sends it to Felix with the idea of making the artist act in so suspicious a way that the police will interfere and find him with the body. So far La Touche felt his surmises had a ring of probability, but he was still puzzled about the second cask. But, as he turned the matter over in his mind, he gradually began to see light here too. Boirac had received a cask from Dupierre with his statue. But as it had gone to Felix he had no empty cask to send back in its place to the sculptors. He must return them an empty cask, or else suspicion falls on him at once. Where is he to get it? And then La Touche saw that the whole business of the second cask must have been arranged simply to meet this difficulty. Boirac must have ordered it, forging Felix’s handwriting. La Touche recollected that order was written on the same paper as the Le Gautier letter, suggesting a common origin for both. Boirac met it in London, took it to the shed, there removed and destroyed the statue, and had the cask returned to Paris. At the Gare du Nord he doubtless changed the labels, so that when it reached Dupierre’s it bore that with the address of his own house. The other label he must have altered from the Waterloo route to that of long sea. This would account for Dubois’s statement that Boirac had changed the labels when he met him in the rue de La Fayette, as well as for the curious faking of that described by the clerk Broughton. The more La Touche pondered over this theory, the more satisfied he became that he had at last reached the truth. But he had to admit that even yet there were several points he could not understand. When did the murder take place, and where? Did Madame really elope with Felix, and, if so, did her husband bring her back alive or dead? How did the impression of the letter ordering the second statue come to be on Felix’s blotting paper? If Madame was murdered in Paris, how did the jewelled pin reach St. Malo?