All this, gentlemen, proves, I think, that the murderer wished to disguise his real personality.

He did it in a very clumsy way--or, at least, so it appears to us.

Don't be alarmed, Daddy Jacques; we are quite sure that you were not the murderer; you never left the side of Monsieur Stangerson.

But if Monsieur Stangerson had not been working that night and had gone back to the chateau after parting with his daughter, and Daddy Jacques had gone to sleep in his attic, no one would have doubted that he was the murderer.

He owes his safety, therefore, to the tragedy having been enacted too soon,--the murderer, no doubt, from the silence in the laboratory, imagined that it was empty, and that the moment for action had come.