“Then,” M. Havard went on, “if Juve did not hurt himself in his cell, he must have left his cell. You see that, surely! Now listen, Monsieur Chaigniste, I came here this morning to inquire into Juve’s condition. But long before your warder opened the prisoner’s cell door and saw his bleeding arm, _I_ knew that Juve must be wounded, and all I came for was to have my suspicions corroborated. A horrible crime was committed last night; its author was wounded in the arm; I suspected Juve, and Juve is wounded in the arm! Then, I say, Juve did that crime! Juve escaped from your prison last night, committed a cowardly murder in the middle of a ball, killing one of my inspectors, who no doubt had managed to penetrate his disguise; then he came back and voluntarily put himself under lock and key, in order to provide himself an alibi ...” “Horrible! horrible!” stammered the Governor, quite overcome. “Yes, _it_ is horrible, but the culprit shall pay dear for his misdeeds, for we have him now safe and sure!” “Horrible!” again groaned M. Chaigniste. “Yes, indeed ... and yet there’s something strikes me as strange about the business and makes me hesitate. Let us reason it out calmly and quietly. There is one quality we cannot deny Juve possesses, and that is intelligence. He must have felt pretty sure the murderer’s wounded arm had been noticed at the grand duchess’s; he must have seen that it would be proof positive, irrefragable proof of his crime. He was not pursued, he had time enough to leave Paris and gain the frontier. That, to my eyes, constitutes a problem it is necessary to solve in order to hold the key to the mystery, and it seems to me difficult to solve it except in favour of my old subordinate.” Little by little, M. Chaigniste had succeeded in gathering his wits together and reducing his thoughts to some sort of order after all the successive shocks he had undergone in so short a space of time. He now recalled the startling confidence Dr. Du Marvier had whispered in his ear and felt it was incumbent in him to share his knowledge with M. Havard. “I am going to tell you one thing,” he began, after some hesitation, “a thing that will possibly help you to clear up this mystery. Dr. Du Marvier, after examining Juve’s wound, noticed that the prisoner looked pale and appeared greatly exhausted; he questioned him, listened to his heart, and observed that its action was considerably retarded. By what he told me in confidence, all this would seem to point to his having been poisoned, very probably with hydrate of chloral. But that is, after all, only a hypothesis, and besides, I don’t quite see how one could establish a connection between this kind of poisoning and the wound we are talking about.” But at the words, M. Havard sprang up from the chair in which he had at last seated himself.