“Yes, Mme. Essarès has informed me and even . . .”
He hesitated once more and again consulted Coralie, who flushed and seemed put out of countenance. M. Masseron, however, waited for a reply which would enable him to proceed. She ended by saying, in a low voice:
“Captain Belval is entitled to know what we have discovered. The truth belongs as much to him as to me; and I have no right to keep it from him. Pray speak, monsieur.”
“I doubt if it is even necessary to speak,” said the magistrate. “It will be enough, I think, to show the captain this photograph-album which I have found. Here you are, Captain Belval.”
And he handed Patrice a very slender album, covered in gray canvas and fastened with an india-rubber band.
Patrice took it with a certain anxiety. But what he saw on opening it was so utterly unexpected that he gave an exclamation:
“It’s incredible!”
On the first page, held in place by their four corners, were two photographs: one, on the right, representing a small boy in an Eton jacket; the other, on the left, representing a very little girl. There was an inscription under each. On the right: “Patrice, at ten.” On the left: “Coralie, at three.”
Moved beyond expression, Patrice turned the leaf. On the second page they appeared again, he at the age of fifteen, she at the age of eight. And he saw himself at nineteen and at twenty-three and at twenty-eight, always accompanied by Coralie, first as a little girl, then as a young girl, next as a woman.
“This is incredible!” he cried. “How is it possible? Here are portraits of myself which I had never seen, amateur photographs obviously, which trace my whole life. Here’s one when I was doing my military training. . . . Here I am on horseback . . . Who can have ordered these photographs? And who can have collected them together with yours, madame?”