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Rh found the real thing without any alloy—but I guess I was wrong."

Rosalie grew rather pale, but did not answer.

"Were you in the house when that man killed himself?" she asked.

"I will tell you all about that," I answered, "and of what happened afterwards—and why it did." So I gave her the whole yarn, speaking in English, which nobody in the house understood. Rosalie listened, scarcely breathing, and her colour came and went like the draught on a red coal.

"So you see, little girl," I wound up, "you yourself were the immediate and direct cause of Chu-Chu's finish."

"And I never for a moment suspected that it was Chu-Chu!" said she. "He told me when he took me that he was a plumber who had just received a telephone call to drop the job he was on and hurry out to Meudon to stop a leak in a waterpipe that was destroying the ceiling. I took him to the house and he asked me to wait, but I could not do so because I had an engagement with a regular client." She looked at me with shining eyes. "And so you hurried out there on my account?" she asked.

"Yes," I answered. "I meant to put the police on to Chu-Chu in any case, but I wouldn't have acted so quickly if it hadn't been for you. Chu-Chu might easily have served you some ugly trick—throttled you and thrown you into the ditch on the way home, or some such pleasantry. He poisoned Ivan merely because he was in the way. If anything had happened to you, sweetheart, I should have wanted to