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You would say: 'Baron de Heidelmann-Bruck, I'm much obliged, but, as an honest man, I tell you that, as soon as I am free, I shall proceed to have this enormous fortune you have been wickedly enjoying taken from you and given to its rightful owner. Isn't that about what you would say?" "I suppose it is," answered M. Paul.

Coquenil was convinced that this journal would contain what he wanted; he did not believe that a man like De Heidelmann-Bruck would keep a diary simply to fill in with insipidities. If he kept it at all, it would be because it pleased him to analyze, fearlessly, his own extraordinary doings, good or bad.

"Please state what you know about this case," he said, and again the audience waited in deathlike stillness. "There is no need of many words," answered M. Paul; then pointing an accusing arm at De Heidelmann-Bruck, "I know that this man shot Enrico Martinez on the night of July 4th, at the Ansonia Hotel."

"Did you did you intend to kill her?" The baron shrugged his shoulders. "I left that to chance." "That's all," said Coquenil. "I I am ready now." With a look of mingled compassion and admiration De Heidelmann-Bruck met M. Paul's unflinching gaze. "We take our medicine, eh? I took mine when you had me hitched to that heart machine, and now you'll take yours.

Coquenil had reached this point in his reading and was pressing on through the pages, utterly oblivious to everything, when a harsh voice broke in upon him: "You seem to have an interesting book, my friend?" Looking up with a start, M. Paul saw De Heidelmann-Bruck himself standing in the open doorway.

"But there's a difference," reflected Coquenil. "The other day you said you were sorry when you left me in that hot cellar. Now you're in a fairly hot place yourself, baron, and I'm not sorry." De Heidelmann-Bruck shrugged his shoulders. "Any objection to my smoking a cigar?" he asked coolly and reached toward his coat pocket. With a quick gesture Coquenil stopped the movement.

The detective began by admitting the practical worthlessness of the evidence in hand against this formidable adversary, and he abandoned, for the moment, his purpose of proving that De Heidelmann-Bruck had killed Martinez.

And on a chair beside the girl, battered and blackened, sat Esmeralda, while under the detective's pillow was the scorched but unharmed diary of De Heidelmann-Bruck! "Both cases serious," was the head doctor's grave judgment. "The man is frightfully burned. The girl's injuries are not so bad, but she is suffering from shock. We'll know more in twenty-four hours."

Duprat rushed in, the Baron de Heidelmann-Bruck, unafraid and unrepentant, had gone to his last long sleep. His face was calm, and even in death his lips seemed set in a mocking smile of triumph. And so it all ended, as the baron remarked, with virtue rewarded and right triumphant over wrong.

The clerk of the court cleared his throat and called out something in incomprehensible singsong. The woman came forward to the witness stand and lifted her veil. As she did so, three distinct things happened: the audience murmured its admiration at a vision of strange beauty, Kittredge stared in a daze of joy, and De Heidelmann-Bruck felt the cold hand of death clutching at his heart.