“Don’t leave me,” sobbed Coralie, “don’t leave me! . . .”
“Only for a second or two,” he said. “We must be avenged later.”
“What is the use, Patrice? What can it matter to us?”
He had a box containing a few matches. Lighting them one after the other, he led Coralie to the panel with the inscription.
“What are you going to do?” she asked.
“I will not have our death put down to suicide. I want to do what our parents did before us and to prepare for the future. Some one will read what I am going to write and will avenge us.”
He took a pencil from his pocket and bent down. There was a free space, right at the bottom of the panel. He wrote:
“Patrice Belval and Coralie, his betrothed, die the same death, murdered by Siméon Diodokis, 14 April, 1915.”
But, as he finished writing, he noticed a few words of the former inscription which he had not yet read, because they were placed outside it, so to speak, and did not appear to form part of it.
“One more match,” he said. “Did you see? There are some words there, the last, no doubt, that my father wrote.”