On those occasions his daughter was always to be seen either following him or by his side; for they never quitted each other, it was said, and had shared the same labours for many years. The young lady, who was then five and thirty, though she looked no more than thirty, had devoted herself entirely to science. She still won admiration for her imperial beauty which had remained intact, without a wrinkle, withstanding time and love. Who would have dreamed that I should one day be seated by her pillow with my papers, and that I should see her, on the point of death, painfully recounting to us the most monstrous and most mysterious crime I have heard of in my career? Who would have thought that I should be, that afternoon, listening to the despairing father vainly trying to explain how his daughter’s assailant had been able to escape from him? Why bury ourselves with our work in obscure retreats in the depths of woods, if it may not protect us against those dangerous chances to life and death which meet us in the busy cities? “Now, Monsieur Stangerson,” said Monsieur de Marquet, with somewhat of an important air, “place yourself exactly where you were when Mademoiselle Stangerson left you to go to her chamber.” Monsieur Stangerson rose and, standing at a certain distance from the door of The Yellow Room, said, in an even voice and without the least trace of emphasis—a voice which I can only describe as a dead voice:— “I was here. About eleven o’clock, after I had made a brief chemical experiment at the furnaces of the laboratory, needing all the space behind me, I had my desk moved here by Daddy Jacques, who spent the evening in cleaning some of my apparatus. My daughter had been working at the same desk with me. When it was her time to leave she rose, kissed me, and bade Daddy Jacques good-night. She had to pass behind my desk and the door to enter her chamber, and she could do this only with some difficulty. That is to say, I was very near the place where the crime occurred later.” “And the desk?” I asked, obeying, in thus mixing myself in the conversation, the express orders of my chief, “as soon as you heard the cry of ‘murder’ followed by the revolver shots, what became of the desk?” Daddy Jacques answered. “We pushed it back against the wall, here—close to where it is at the present moment—so as to be able to get at the door at once.” I followed up my reasoning, to which, however, I attached but little importance, regarding it as only a weak hypothesis, with another question. “Might not a man in the room, the desk being so near to the door, by stooping and slipping under the desk, have left it unobserved?”