"Here is what he said," he thought, "and there is what I believed. What does the difference mean? Here is the thing that was, and there is the thing that appeared to be. Why did the criminal wish the thing that was to appear under that particular aspect? To remove all suspicion from him? But, in that case, was it necessary that suspicion should fall precisely on those on whom it did?"
The questions came crowding one upon the other. He sometimes answered them at random, mentioning names and uttering words in succession, as though the name mentioned might be just that of the criminal, and the words uttered those which contained the unseen reality.
Then at once he would take up the story again, as schoolboys do when parsing and analyzing a passage, in which each expression is carefully sifted, each period discussed, each sentence reduced to its essential value.
* * * * *
Hours and hours passed. Suddenly, in the middle of the night, he gave a start. He took out his watch. By the light of his electric lamp he saw that it was seventeen minutes to twelve.
"So at seventeen minutes to twelve at night," he said, "I fathomed the mystery."
He tried to control his emotion, but it was too great; and his nerves were so immensely staggered by the trial that he began to shed tears. He had caught sight of the appalling truth, all of a sudden, as when at night one half sees a landscape under a lightning-flash.
There is nothing more unnerving than this sudden illumination when we have been groping and struggling in the dark. Already exhausted by his physical efforts and by the want of food, from which he was beginning to suffer, he felt the shock so intensely that, without caring to think a moment longer, he managed to go to sleep, or, rather, to sink into sleep, as one sinks into the healing waters of a bath.
When he woke, in the small hours, alert and well despite the discomfort of his couch, he shuddered on thinking of the theory which he had accepted; and his first instinct was to doubt it. He had, so to speak, no time.
All the proofs came rushing to his mind of their own accord and at once transformed the theory into one of those certainties which it would be madness to deny. It was that and nothing else. As he had foreseen, the truth lay recorded in Sauverand's story. And he had not been mistaken, either, in saying to Mazeroux that the manner in which the mysterious letters appeared had put him on the track of the truth.