"Notice that I attribute no exaggerated importance to these proofs. It is not on them alone that I base the accusation. But they constitute a strange witness, very disquieting in its mute eloquence. They add to the doubt which your desire for silence has awakened. You tell me that you were not near Rovère when he died. These proofs, irrefutable as a fact, seem to prove at once the contrary. Then, the day Rovère was assassinated where were you?" "I do not know. At home, without doubt. I will have to think it over. At what hour was Rovère killed?" M. Ginory made a gesture of ignorance and in a tone of raillery said: "That! There are others who know it better than I." And Dantin, irritated, looked at him. "Yes," went on the Magistrate, with mocking politeness, "the surgeons who can tell the hour in which he was killed." He turned over his papers. "The assassination was about an hour before midday. In Paris, in broad daylight, at that hour, a murder was committed!" "At that hour," said Jacques Dantin, "I was just leaving home." "To go where?" "For a walk. I had a headache. I was going to walk in the Champs-Elysées to cure it." "And did you, in your walk, meet any one whom you knew?" "No one." "Did you go into some shop?" "I did not." "In short, you have no _alibi_?" The word made Dantin again tremble. He felt the meshes of the net closing around him. "An _alibi_! Ah that! Decidedly. Monsieur, you accuse me of assassinating my friend," he violently said. "I do not accuse; I ask a question." And M. Ginory in a dry tone which gradually became cutting and menacing said: "I question you, but I warn you that the interview has taken a bad turn. You do not answer; you pretend to keep secret I know not what information which concerns us. You are not yet exactly accused. But--but--but--you are going to be"---- The Magistrate waited a moment as if to give the man time to reflect, and he held his pen suspended, after dipping it in the ink, as an auctioneer holds his ivory hammer before bringing it down to close a sale. "I am going to drop the pen," it seemed to say. Dantin, very angry, remained silent. His look of bravado seemed to say: "Do you dare? If you dare, do it!" "You refuse to speak?" asked Ginory for the last time. "I refuse." "You have willed it! Do you persist in giving no explanation; do you entrench yourself behind I know not what scruple or duty to honor; do you keep to your systematic silence? For the last time, do you still persist in this?" "I have nothing--nothing--nothing to tell you!" Dantin cried in a sort of rage.