"That signifies--Oh! I am going to astonish you. That signifies"--M. Ginory turned toward his registrar: "You saw the other evening, Favarel, the experiment in which Dr. Oudin showed us the heart and lungs performing their functions in the thorax of a living man, made visible by the Roentgen Rays. Well! This is not any more miraculous. These photographs (he turned now toward Dantin) were taken of the retina of the dead man's eye. They are the reflection, the reproduction of the image implanted there, the picture of the last living being contemplated in the agony; the last visual sensation which the unfortunate man experienced. The retina has given to us--as a witness--the image of the living person seen by the dead man for the last time!" A deep silence fell upon the three men in that little room, where one of them alone, lost his foothold at this strange revelation. For the Magistrate it was a decisive moment; when all had been said, when the man having been questioned closely, jumps at the foregone conclusion. As for the registrar, however blasé he may have become by these daily experiences, it was the decisive moment! the moment when, the line drawn from the water, the fish is landed, writhing on the hook! Jacques Dantin, with an instinctive movement, had rejected, pushed back on the table those photographs which burned his fingers like the cards in which some fortune teller has deciphered the signs of death. "Well?" asked M. Ginory. "Well!" repeated Dantin in a strangled tone, either not comprehending or comprehending too much, struggling as if under the oppression of a nightmare. "How do you explain how your face, your shadow if you prefer, was found reflected in Rovère's eyes, and that in his agony, this was probably what he saw; yes, saw bending over him?" Dantin cast a frightened glance around the room, and asked himself if he was not shut up in a maniac's cell; if the question was real; if the voice he heard was not the voice of a dream! "How can I explain? but I cannot explain, I do not understand, I do not know--it is madness, it is frightful, it is foolish!" "But yet," insisted M. Ginory, "this folly, as you call it, must have some explanation." "What do you wish to have me say? I do not understand. I repeat, I do not understand." "What if you do not, you cannot deny your presence in the house at the moment of Rovère's death"---- "Why cannot I deny it?" Dantin interrupted. "Because the vision is there, hidden, hazy, in the retina; because this photograph, in which you recognized yourself, denounces, points out, your presence at the moment of the last agony." "I was not there! I swear that I was not there!" Dantin fervently declared. "Then, explain," said the Magistrate. Dantin remained silent a moment, as if frightened. Then he stammered: "I am dreaming!--I dreaming!" and M. Ginory replied in a calm tone: