As for the shelves underneath, they contained an unequaled special library
of subjects interesting to a detective, both science and fiction being
freely drawn upon in French, English, and German, for, while Coquenil was a
man of action in a big way, he was also a student and a reader of books,
and he delighted in long, lonely evenings, when, as now, he sat in his
comfortable study thinking, thinking.

Melanie entered presently with coffee and cigarettes, which she placed on a
table near the green-shaded lamp, within easy reach of the great
red-leather chair where M. Paul was seated. Then she stole out
noiselessly. It was five minutes past eight, and for an hour Coquenil
thought and smoked and drank coffee. Occasionally he frowned and moved
impatiently, and several times he took off his glasses and stroked his
brows over the eyes.

Finally he gave a long sigh of relief, and shutting his hands and throwing
out his arms with a satisfied gesture, he rose and walked to the fireplace,
over which hung a large portrait of his mother and several photographs, one
of these taken in the exact attitude and costume of the painting of
Whistler's mother in the Luxembourg gallery. M. Paul was proud of the
striking resemblance between the two women. For some moments he stood
before the fine, kindly face, and then he said aloud, as if speaking to
her: "It looks like a hard fight, little mother, but I'm not afraid." And
almost as he spoke, which seemed like a good omen, there came a clang at
the iron gate in the garden and the sound of quick, crunching steps on the
gravel walk. M. Pougeot had arrived.

M. Lucien Pougeot was one of the eighty police commissaries who, each in
his own quarter, oversee the moral washing of Paris's dirty linen. A
commissary of police is first of all a magistrate, but, unless he is a