“Yes. Instantly I suspected something wrong, and wondered for what purpose he had been in the lady’s sitting-room. Therefore without hesitation I pushed open the door and looked inside. Judge my surprise when I found the unfortunate young man writhing in agony on the ground. I knelt by him, but recognizing me as the woman at whose house he had been cheated he shrank from me. ‘That man!’ he gasped with difficulty,--‘that man has killed me!’ and a few moments later his limbs straightened themselves out in a final paroxysm of agony and he passed away.” Mrs. Thorne burst into a flood of tears. The voluble Frenchwoman was silent for a moment, her eyes fixed upon the face of the man against whom she had uttered that terrible denunciation. “I stood there terrified, unable to move,” she went on. “Laumont had, as I feared, killed him.” “Killed him? How can you prove it?” demanded the cunning card-sharper, who, in order to throw the police off the scent, pursued the harmless calling of hairdresser in that back street off the Boulevard St. Michel. “How can you prove it?” CHAPTER XX REVEALS THE TRUTH The woman Fournereau crossed the room quickly to a small rosewood bureau and took therefrom a little card-board box about a couple of inches square, such as are used for cheap jewelry. “I have something here,” she said, addressing the man before her. “It was lying on the floor. You alone knew its secret--a secret which I too have lately discovered.” And opening the box carefully she displayed, lying in a bed of cotton-wool, what at first appeared to be a woman’s steel thimble. Taking it from its hiding-place and putting it upon the fore-finger of her right hand, we saw that, instead of being what it at first appeared, it rose to a sharply tempered steel point about half an inch long protruding from the finger-tip. I glanced at the man accused. His face had blanched to the lips at sight of it. “This,” she explained, “I discovered on the floor close to where the dead man was lying. It is a diabolic invention of Laumont which he showed me a year ago, although he did not then explain its use. An examination which has been made by a friend, a chemist, has shown plainly the truth. You will notice that the point is fine as a needle, but is hollow, like that of a hypodermic syringe. Within, at the point touched by the tip of the finger, is a small chamber filled with a most subtle and deadly poison extracted from a small lizard peculiar to the banks of the Upper Niger.”