the moment that you were dead, I had the most undeniable legal right to them. And I shall get them, because it is physically impossible to bring up the least sort of proof against me."
He moved closer.
"There's not a charge that can hurt me. Suspicions, yes, moral presumptions, clues, anything you like, but not a scrap of material evidence. Nobody knows me. One person has seen me as a tall man, another as a short man. My very name is unknown. All my murders have been committed anonymously. All my murders are more like suicides, or can be explained as suicides.
"I tell you the law is powerless. With Lupin dead, and Florence Levasseur dead, there's no one to bear witness against me. Even if they arrested me, they would have to discharge me in the end for lack of evidence. I shall be branded, execrated, hated, and cursed; my name will stink in people's nostrils, as if I were the greatest of malefactors. But I shall possess the hundred millions; and with that, pretty one, I shall possess the friendship of all decent men!
"I tell you again, with Lupin and you gone, it's all over. There's nothing left, nothing but some papers and a few little things which I have been weak enough to keep until now, in this pocketbook here, and which would be enough and more than enough to cost me my head, if I did not intend to burn them in a few minutes and send the ashes to the bottom of the well.
"So you see, Florence, all my measures are taken. You need not hope for compassion from me, nor for help from anywhere else, since no one knows where I have brought you, and Arsène Lupin is no longer alive. Under
