“What’s become of you, my young friend, and what are you doing that’s new? Have you stopped wrecking urinals?”

Marcueil did not understand to begin with, but then he remembered.

“What urinals? But, my dear general, you can’t call it wrecking a device, just demonstrating that it isn’t strong enough to withstand the use it is designed for!”

“He, he!” laughed the general, as Bathybius briefly outlined the attraction for the evening. “Let’s hope the little women will be strong enough.”

“There are seven of them,” said Marcueil.

Whereupon the general bustled off in the direction of the drawing room.

It was ten o’clock, and André Marcueil was looking for an excuse to slip off to make way for the Indian. Chance – or perhaps some previously determined assistance brought about by chance – supplied him with one.

“Someone,” said a valet, “wishes to speak to monsieur.”

This “someone,” when he was then ushered into the study, proved to be a policeman.

Not one of those horrific, mustachioed policemen whom we were inured to in our childhood by Punch and Judy shows, but a beardless policeman in undress uniform – so un-dress, in fact, that you would have thought he was hardly even a postman – rolling between his fingers a mere képi instead of the legendary three-cornered hat.

The honest lad seemed much embarrassed by the delicacy of his mission.

“Speak up, my good fellow,” said Marcueil good-naturedly, and to help him appreciate this good nature he rang for a drink.

The policeman tasted the rum, and praised it with much the same obsequiousness as he might have employed were he glorifying the man who was giving it to him. He obviously wanted to obtain Marcueil’s favor.

He began:

“The Service being what it is. . . the Service. . . well, we happened to run across – not on purpose, of course! – but we ran across a little girl who had been raped, and who’d been dead six days, here in the Lurance grounds; she’d died from very irregular causes. She hadn’t been raped – first and killed afterward, the way it usually happens, but – how shall I say it? – raped to death.”

He expressed himself hesitantly, but quite correctly, and with a sparing use of adjectives.

“Six days ago?” asked Marcueil. “Justice is slow. . . six days ago. . . The day I left, as a matter of fact; I’ve been away on a little trip. . . with some friends. . . on a train. They were on the train. . . A strange excursion! There were some other rapes, by a curious coincidence, and an armed robbery, too, as if by chance, and, no one knows how, two murders. But you were saying: a rape on the Lurance grounds?”

He frowned and rang again.

“Send in Mathieu, the gamekeeper.”

Scarcely had the guard arrived when: