We were shown into a small salon, and presently the mistress of the house came to us there. Mme. Olivier was a very tall woman, her tallness accentuated by the long white overall she wore, and a coif like a nun's that shrouded her head. She had a long pale face, and wonderful dark eyes that burnt with a light almost fanatical. She looked more like a priestess of old than a modern French woman. One cheek was disfigured by a scar, and I remembered that her husband and co worker had been killed in an explosion in the laboratory three years before, and that she herself had been terribly burned. Ever since then she had shut herself away from the world and plunged with fiery energy into the work of scientific research. She received us with cold politeness.
“I have been interviewed by the police
