Page:The Mystery of Madeline Le Blanc (1900).djvu/70

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the morning this conversation took place at the Hôtel de Ville:—

"Well, what did you see?" asked a stout man sitting behind a desk, in the lower office. He was the prefect of the police.

"It was too dark a night to see anything, " replied an individual, bespattered with mud, standing before the desk,

"Was the house quiet?"

"No. I lay all night beneath the grating of a cellar window, on the north side of the house. The window was nailed up from the inside, so that I could see absolutely nothing. Until almost midnight, I could hear faint murmuring sounds coming from somewhere beneath me; I think perhaps from the very room in the cellar beside which I lay. Once or twice I thought I heard talking on the ground floor; but being some feet below the