Did the dead man possess a secret which weighed heavily upon him, and which he shared with that other? And the other? Who was he? Perhaps an accomplice. Everything she had said belonged to the Commissary of Police and to the press. She had told her story with omissions, with timorous looks, with sighs of doubts and useless gestures. Bernardet listened, noting each word, the purposes of this portress, the melodramatic gossip in certain information in which he verified the precision--all this was engraven on his brain, as earlier in the day the expression of the dead man's eyes had been reflected in the kodak. He tried to distinguish, as best he could, the undeniable facts in this first deposition, when a woman of the people, garrulous, indiscreet, gossiping and zealous, has the joy of playing a rôle. He mentally examined her story, with the interruptions which her husband made when she accused the individual. He stopped her with a look, placing his hand on her arm and said: "One must wait! One does not know. He had the appearance of a worthy man." The woman, pointing out with a grand gesture, the body lying upon the floor, said: "Oh, well! And did not M. Rovère have the appearance of a worthy man also? And did it hinder him from coming to that?" Over Bernardet's face a mocking little smile passed. "He always had the appearance of a worthy man," he said, looking at the dead man, "and he even seemed like a worthy man who looked at rascals with courage. I am certain," slowly added the officer, "that if one could know the last thought in that brain which thinks no more, could see in those unseeing eyes the last image upon which they looked, one would learn all that need be known about that individual of whom you speak and the manner of his death." "Possibly he killed himself," said the Commissary. But the hypothesis of suicide was not possible, as Bernardet remarked to him, much to the great contempt of the reporters who were covering their notebooks with a running handwriting and with hieroglyphics. The wound was too deep to have been made by the man's own hand. And, besides, they would find the weapon with which that horrible gash had been made, near at hand. There was no weapon of any kind near the body. The murderer had either carried it away with him in his flight or he had thrown it away in some other part of the apartment. They would soon know. They need not even wait for an autopsy to determine that it was an assassination. "That is evident," interrupted the Commissary; "the autopsy will be made, however." And, with an insistence which surprised the Commissary a little, Bernardet, in courteous tones, evidently haunted by one particular idea, begged and almost supplicated M. Desbrière to send for the Attorney for the Republic, so that the corpse could be taken as soon as possible to the Morgue. "Poor man!" exclaimed Mme. Moniche. "To the Morgue! To the Morgue!" Bernardet calmed her with a word.