From hour to hour the affair expanded, and grew more virulent, becoming a social battlefield on which rival parties contended hotly. Magistrate Daix had doubtless received orders to conduct his investigations with all possible speed. In less than a month he interrogated all the witnesses--Mignot, Mademoiselle Rouzaire, Father Philibin, Brother Fulgence, several schoolchildren and railway employés. Brother Fulgence, with his usual exuberance, demanded that his three assistants, Brothers Isidore, Lazarus, and Gorgias, should also be interrogated; he likewise insisted that a search should be made at his school, and this was done; but naturally nothing was found. Daix thought it his duty, however, to inquire minutely into the suggestion that the crime might have been committed by a tramp. By his orders the entire gendarmerie of the department scoured the roads, and some fifty tramps were arrested, and then released, without the slightest clue being arrived at. In one instance a pedlar remained three days under lock and key, but to no purpose. Then Daix, setting aside the theory of a prowler, remained in presence of the copy-slip, the one tangible piece of evidence at his disposal, the only thing on which he could rear his charge. When this reached the ears of Marc and David, they became calm again, for it seemed to them impossible that a serious accusation could be based on that slip of paper, the importance of which was so open to discussion. As David repeated, although no guilty tramp had been found, the hypothesis that one existed, or at least an element of doubt, still remained. And if thereto one added the lack of proof against Simon, the moral improbability of his guilt, his never-varying protests of innocence, it was purely impossible for an Investigating Magistrate, possessed of any conscience, to come to the conclusion that he was the culprit. A _non-lieu_, otherwise a decision that there was no ground to proceed further against the prisoner, seemed a certainty on which one might rely.