Dantin waited a moment before he replied, as if measuring these words, and searching to find out just what M. Ginory was driving at. This silence, short and momentous, was dramatic. The Magistrate knew it well--that moment of agony when the question seems like a cord, like a lasso suddenly thrown, and tightening around one's neck. There was always, in his examination, a tragic moment. "I remember very well that I saw a person whom I did not know enter the room where I was with M. Rovère," Jacques Dantin replied at last. "A person whom you did not know? You knew her very well, since you had more than once asked her if M. Rovère was at home. That person is Mme. Moniche, who has made her deposition." "And what did she say in her deposition?" The Magistrate took a paper from the table in front of him and read: "When I entered, M. Rovère was standing before his safe, and I noticed that the individual of whom I spoke (the individual is you) cast upon the coupons a look which made me cold. I thought to myself: 'This man looks as if he is meditating some bad deed.'" "That is to say," brusquely said Dantin, who had listened with frowning brows and with an angry expression, "that Mme. Moniche accuses me of having murdered M. Rovère!" "You are in too much haste. Mme. Moniche has not said that precisely. She was only surprised--surprised and frightened--at your expression as you looked at the deeds, bills and coupons." "Those coupons," asked Dantin rather anxiously, "have they, then, been stolen?" "Ah, that we know nothing about," and the Magistrate smiled. "One has found in Rovère's safe in the neighborhood of 460,000 francs in coupons, city of Paris bonds, shares in mining societies, rent rolls; but nothing to prove that there was before the assassination more than that sum." "Had it been forced open?" "No; but anyone familiar with the dead man, a friend who knew the secret of the combination of the safe, the four letters forming the word, could have opened it without trouble." Among these words Dantin heard one which struck him full in the face--"friend." M. Ginory had pronounced it in an ordinary tone, but Dantin had seized and read in it a menace. For a moment the man who was being questioned felt a peculiar sensation. It seemed to him one day when he had been almost drowned during a boating party that same agony had seized him; it seemed that he had fallen into some abyss, some icy pool, which was paralyzing him. Opposite to him the Examining Magistrate experienced a contrary feeling. The caster of a hook and line feels a similar sensation; but it was intensified a hundred times in the Magistrate, a fisher of truth, throwing the line into a human sea, the water polluted, red with blood and mixed with mud.