“For God’s sake, have mercy, Andre!” she cried, wringing her hands with anguish, “let me tell you everything; don’t kill—­”

This burst of maternal love, M. Fauvel thought the pleadings of a criminal woman defending her lover.

He roughly seized his wife by the arm, and thrust her aside, saying with indignant scorn: 

“Get out of the way!”

But she would not be repulsed; rushing up to Raoul, she threw her arms around him, and said to her husband: 

“Kill me, and me alone; for I am the guilty one.”

At these words M. Fauvel glared at the guilty pair, and, deliberately taking aim, fired.

Neither Raoul nor Mme. Fauvel moved.  The banker fired a second time; then a third.

He cocked the pistol for a fourth shot, when a man rushed into the room, snatched the pistol from the banker’s hand, and, throwing him on the sofa, ran toward Mme. Fauvel.

This man was M. Verduret, who had been warned by Cavaillon, but did not know that Mme. Gypsy had extracted the balls from M. Fauvel’s revolver.

“Thank Heaven!” he cried, “she is unhurt.”

“How dare you interfere?” cried the banker, who by this time had joined the group.  “I have the right to avenge my honor when it has been degraded; the villain shall die!”

M. Verduret seized the banker’s wrists in a vice-like grasp, and whispered in his ear: 

“Thank God you are saved from committing a terrible crime; the anonymous letter deceived you.”

In violent situations like this, all the untoward, strange attending circumstances appear perfectly natural to the participators, whose passions have already carried them beyond the limits of social propriety.

Thus M. Fauvel never once thought of asking this stranger who he was and where he came from.

He heard and understood but one fact:  the anonymous letter had lied.

“But my wife confesses she is guilty,” he stammered.

“So she is,” replied M. Verduret, “but not of the crime you imagine.  Do you know who that man is, that you attempted to kill?”

“Her lover!”

“No:  her son!”

The words of this stranger, showing his intimate knowledge of the private affairs of all present, seemed to confound and frighten Raoul more than M. Fauvel’s threats had done.  Yet he had sufficient presence of mind to say: 

“It is the truth!”

The banker looked wildly from Raoul to M. Verduret; then, fastening his haggard eyes on his wife, exclaimed: 

“It is false! you are all conspiring to deceive me!  Proofs!”

“You shall have proofs,” replied M. Verduret, “but first listen.”

And rapidly, with his wonderful talent for exposition, he related the principal points of the plot he had discovered.

The true state of the case was terribly distressing to M. Fauvel, but nothing compared with what he had suspected.