"Because she was the only witness of his crime. She alone would have the power to identify him as the murderer." "You forget that it is just that power which the poor girl lost during her illness. The fever deprived her of memory." "That effect of the fever may not have been permanent. The agitation which she showed at the mention of her aunt's name--when Sister Gudule questioned her about the silk handkerchief given to her by Marie Prévol--would indicate that memory was not a blank. And again, if she had forgotten the person of the murderer, or even the fact of the murder, he would not know that, and would regard her existence as a source of danger to himself." Félix Drubarde smiled the superior smile of experience reproving folly. "And you think that after having allowed this one witness of his crime to exist unmolested for ten years, the assassin all at once took it into his head to murder her; that with this view he carried her to your barbarous province of Cornuailles, and there flung her over an embankment. I am tempted to paraphrase the Scripture, Monsieur, and to exclaim, 'Are there not viaducts and embankments in this vast France of ours, that a man should go to the remote west of your little England in order to commit murder in that particular fashion!'" Heathcote felt that the police-officer had the best of the argument. "I grant that it would have been a clumsy method of getting rid of the girl," he said, "but murder has been clumsily done before to-day, and imagination can conceive no crime so improbable as not to be paralleled by fact. However, it is perhaps too soon to speculate that the murderer of Marie Prévol was also the murderer of Léonie Lemarque. What we have to do is to find out the reason of the girl's journey to England. But before we set about that task, I should like you to tell me what steps you took in your endeavour to trace the murderer after the examination before the _Juge d'Instruction_."