Then followed the examination of the child, and of Marie Prévol's mother. They were both lengthy, for the _Juge d'Instruction_ had applied himself with peculiar earnestness to the task of unravelling this mystery, and it was only in the details of the dead woman's surroundings that the clue to the secret could be found.
The child had evidently answered the magisterial questions with extreme intelligence. However she might have broken down afterwards, she had been perfectly rational at the time of the interrogatory. It seemed to Heathcote, influenced, perhaps, by his knowledge of after events, that the child's replies indicated a hyper-sensitiveness, and an intellect intensified by feverish excitement.
"You remember going to Saint-Germain with your aunt?"
"Tell me all you can recall about that day. Tell me exactly when and how you started, and what happened to you on the way. I want to hear everything."
"It was three o'clock when we left my aunt's house. Monsieur de Maucroix came a little before that, and asked my aunt to go to dinner with him somewhere in the country. The weather was too lovely for Paris, he said. She did not want to go. She said Georges would be angry."
"Yes, I think so. She often talked of him. Monsieur de Maucroix used to talk of him, and to be angry about him."
"I don't know. He used to say Georges will not let you do this; Georges will not let you do that. What right has Georges that he should order you here or there? And then my aunt used to cry."
"Were you often at your aunt's apartment?"
"You lived there sometimes, did you not?"
"Yes, I used to stay there for a week sometimes. It was very nice to be with my aunt, much nicer than being with grandmother. She used to take me out in a carriage sometimes. Her rooms were prettier than grandmother's rooms, for there were flowers all about, and pretty things, and she was prettier, and wore prettier clothes."
"But if you were there for a week at a time, how was it that you never saw this Monsieur Georges, who was such a close friend of your aunt's?"
"He never came till late at night. He used to come to supper often. I heard the servant say so. She said he was a dissipated man, a bad subject. Grandmother said so too. 'Has that night-bird been here again?' she asked my aunt once; and my aunt was angry, and began to cry; and then grandmother got angry too, and said, 'Who is he, and what is he? I want to know that.' And then my aunt said, 'He is a gentleman; that is enough for you to know;' and then she showed my grandmother a pretty necklace that Georges had given her the night before--a necklace of shining white beads, like the water-drops from the fountain at the Tuileries."