HOW THE MURDERER GOT OUT
and persons of this pavilion could choose his own time for entering The Yellow Room."
"He could not have entered it if anybody had been in the laboratory," said Monsieur de Marquet.
"How do we know that?" replied Larsan. "There was the dinner in the laboratory, the coming and going of the servants in attendance. There was a chemical experiment being carried on between ten and eleven o'clock, with Monsieur Stangerson, his daughter, and Daddy Jacques engaged at the furnace in a corner of the high chimney. Who can say that the murderer—an intimate!—a friend!—did not take advantage of that moment to slip into The Yellow Room, after having taken off his boots in the lavatory?"
"It is very improbable," said Monsieur Stangerson.
"Doubtless—but it is not impossible. I assert nothing. As to the escape from the pavilion—that's another thing, the most natural thing in the world."
For a moment Frédéric Larsan paused,—a moment that appeared to us a very long time. The eagerness with which we awaited what he was going to tell us may be imagined.
"I have not been in The Yellow Room," he continued, "but I take it for granted that you have satisfied yourselves that he could have left the room only by way of the door; it is by the door, then, that the murderer made his way out. At what time? At the moment when it was most easy
129
