At the request of the delegato, we all entered the Square Tower. We took our places in Old Bob’s sitting room, where the inquest was to be held and where each of us in turn recounted what we had seen and heard. Mere Bernier was first questioned, but little or nothing could be gained from her testimony. She declared that she knew nothing about anything. She had been in Old Bob’s bedroom, attending to the needs of the injured man, when we had rushed madly into the room. She had been with Old Bob for an hour, having left her husband in the lodge of the Square Tower, ready to work at making a rope. It was a curious fact, but I was less interested at that moment in what was going on under my eyes than in what I could not see and yet knew _that I expected_. Would Edith speak? She was looking out of the open window, her lips compressed, her brows drawn. A gendarme was standing near the corpse over the face of which a handkerchief had been laid. Edith, like myself, was paying very little heed to what was going on inside the room. Her eyes were fixed upon Bernier’s body. An exclamation from the delegato struck upon our ears. The further the evidence of the witnesses progressed, the greater became the amazement of the Commissioner, and the more and more inexplicable he found the crime. He was on the point of finding it impossible that it should have been committed at all, when it came Mme. Edith’s turn to be interrogated. They questioned her. Her lips were already opened to answer the first question when Rouletabille’s quiet voice was heard: “Look at the end of the shadow of the eucalyptus.” “What is there at the end of the shadow of the eucalyptus?” demanded the delegato. “The weapon with which the crime was committed,” replied the reporter. He jumped out of the window to the court and picked up from the bloody stones a sharp, shining piece of flint. He brandished it in our eyes. We all recognized it. It was “the oldest dagger of the human race.” CHAPTER XIX IN WHICH ROULETABILLE ORDERS THE IRON DOORS TO BE CLOSED