"You must bear with me, my young friend, while I consider all these points.

Did she expect to join that night a lover--a man with the brains to devise this crime?
But if so--and here I come to the second question omitted from M.Ricardo's list--why, on the patch of grass outside the door of the salon, were the footsteps of the man and woman so carefully erased, and the footsteps of Mlle.

Celie--those little footsteps so easily identified--left for all the world to see and recognise ?" Ricardo felt like a child in the presence of his schoolmaster.

He was convicted of presumption.

He had set down his questions with the belief that they covered the ground.