"One thing, therefore, is certain: the inheritance in no way affected Hippolyte Fauville's resolves or actions. And, nevertheless, one after the other, with inflexible regularity, as if they had been struck down in the very order called for by the terms of the Mornington inheritance, they all disappeared: Cosmo Mornington, then Hippolyte Fauville, then Edmond Fauville, then Marie Fauville, then Gaston Sauverand. First, the possessor of the fortune; next, all those whom he had appointed his legatees; and, I repeat, in the very order in which the will enabled them to lay claim to the fortune!
"Is it not strange?" asked Perenna, "and are we not bound to suppose that there was a controlling mind at the back of it all? Are we not bound to admit that the formidable contest was influenced by that inheritance, and that, above the hatred and jealousy of the loathsome Fauville, there loomed a being endowed with even more tremendous energy, pursuing a tangible aim and driving to their deaths, one by one, like so many numbered victims, all the unconscious actors in the tragedy of which he tied and of which he is now untying the threads?"
Don Luis leaned forward and continued earnestly:
"Monsieur le Préfet, the public instinct so thoroughly agrees with me, a section of the police, with M. Weber, the deputy chief detective at its head, argues in a manner so exactly identical with my own, that the existence of that being is at once confirmed in every mind. There had to be some one to act as the controlling brain, to provide the will and the energy. That some one was myself. After all, why not? Did not I possess the condition which was indispensable to make any one interested in the murders? Was I not Cosmo Mornington's heir?
