Unmasked and helpless, she maintained an attitude of challenge and defiance

THE WOMAN OF
MYSTERY

BY
MAURICE LEBLANC

AUTHOR OF "CONFESSIONS OF ARSÈNE LUPIN," "THE TEETH OF THE TIGER," ETC.

NEW YORK
THE MACAULAY COMPANY

Copyright, 1916.
By THE MACAULAY COMPANY

CONTENTS

THE WOMAN OF MYSTERY

CHAPTER I
THE MURDER

"Suppose I were to tell you," said Paul Delroze, "that I once stood face to face with him on French. . . ."

Élisabeth looked up at him with the fond expression of a bride to whom the least word of the man she loves is a subject of wonder:

"You have seen William II. in France?"

"Saw him with my own eyes; and I have never forgotten a single one of the details that marked the meeting. And yet it happened very long ago."

He was speaking with a sudden seriousness, as though the revival of that memory had awakened the most painful thoughts in his mind.

"Tell me about it, won't you, Paul?" asked Élisabeth.

"Yes, I will," he said. "In any case, though I was only a child at the time, the incident played so tragic a part in my life that I am bound to tell you the whole story."

The train stopped and they got out at Corvigny, the last station on the local branch line which, starting from the chief town in the department, runs through the Liseron Valley and ends, fifteen miles from the frontier, at the foot of the little Lorraine city which Vauban, as he tells us in his "Memoirs," surrounded "with the most perfect demilunes imaginable."

The railway-station presented an appearance of unusual animation. There were numbers of soldiers, including many officers. A crowd of passengers—tradespeople, peasants, workmen and visitors to the neighboring health-resorts served by Corvigny—stood amid piles of luggage on the platform, awaiting the departure of the next train for the junction.

It was the last Thursday in July, the Thursday before the mobilization of the French army.

Élisabeth pressed up against her husband:

"Oh, Paul," she said, shivering with anxiety, "if only we don't have war!"

"War! What an idea!"

"But look at all these people leaving, all these families running away from the frontier!"

"That proves nothing."

"No, but you saw it in the paper just now. The news is very bad. Germany is preparing for war. She has planned the whole thing. . . . Oh, Paul, if we were to be separated! . . . I should know nothing about you . . . and you might be wounded . . . and . . ."

He squeezed her hand:

"Don't be afraid, Élisabeth. Nothing of the kind will happen. There can't be war unless somebody declares it. And who would be fool enough, criminal enough, to do anything so abominable?"

"I am not afraid," she said, "and I am sure that I should be very brave if you had to go. Only . . . only it would be worse for us than for anybody else. Just think, darling: we were only married this morning!"

At this reference to their wedding of a few hours ago, containing so great a promise of deep and lasting joy, her charming face lit up, under its halo of golden curls, with a smile of utter trustfulness; and she whispered:

"Married this morning, Paul! . . . So you can understand that my load of happiness is not yet very heavy."

There was a movement among the crowd. Everybody gathered around the exit. A general officer, accompanied by two aides-de-camp, stepped out into the station-yard, where a motor-car stood waiting for him. The strains were heard of a military band; a battalion of light infantry marched down the road. Next came a team of sixteen horses, driven by artillery-men and dragging an enormous siege-piece which, in spite of the weight of its carriage, looked light, because of the extreme length of the gun. A herd of bullocks followed.

Paul, who was unable to find a porter, was standing on the pavement, carrying the two traveling-bags, when a man in leather gaiters, green velveteen breeches and a shooting-jacket with horn buttons, came up to him and raised his cap:

"M. Paul Delroze?" he said. "I am the keeper at the château."

He had a powerful, open face, a skin hardened by exposure to the sun and the cold, hair that was already turning gray and that rather uncouth manner often displayed by old servants whose place allows them a certain degree of independence. For seventeen years he had lived on the great estate of Ornequin, above Corvigny, and managed it for Élisabeth's father, the Comte d'Andeville.

"Ah, so you're Jérôme?" cried Paul. "Good! I see you had the Comte d'Andeville's letter. Have our servants come?"

"They arrived this morning, sir, the three of them; and they have been helping my wife and me to tidy up the house and make it ready to receive the master and the mistress."

He took off his cap again to Élisabeth, who said:

"Then you remember me, Jérôme? It is so long since I was here!"

"Mlle. Élisabeth was four years old then. It was a real sorrow for my wife and me when we heard that you would not come back to the house . . . nor Monsieur le Comte either, because of his poor dead wife. So Monsieur le Comte does not mean to pay us a little visit this year?"

"No, Jérôme, I don't think so. Though it is so many years ago, my father is still very unhappy."

Jérôme took the bags and placed them in a fly which he had ordered at Corvigny. The heavy luggage was to follow in the farm-cart.

It was a fine day and Paul told them to lower the hood. Then he and his wife took their seats.

"It's not a very long drive," said the keeper. "Under ten miles. But it's up-hill all the way."

"Is the house more or less fit to live in?" asked Paul.

"Well, it's not like a house that has been lived in; but you'll see for yourself, sir. We've done the best we could. My wife is so pleased that you and the mistress are coming! You'll find her waiting for her at the foot of the steps. I told her that you would be there between half-past six and seven. . . ."

The fly drove off.

"He seems a decent sort of man," said Paul to Élisabeth, "but he can't have much opportunity for talking. He's making up for lost time."

The street climbed the steep slope of the Corvigny hills and constituted, between two rows of shops, hotels and public buildings, the main artery of the town, blocked on this day with unaccustomed traffic. Then it dipped and skirted Vauban's ancient bastions. Next came a switchback road across a plain commanded on the right and left by the two forts known as the Petit and the Grand Jonas.

As they drove along this winding road, which meandered through fields of oats and wheat beneath the leafy vault formed overhead by the close-ranked poplars, Paul Delroze came back to the episode of his childhood which he had promised to tell to Élisabeth:

"As I said, Élisabeth, the incident is connected with a terrible tragedy, so closely connected that the two form only one episode in my memory. The tragedy was much talked about at the time; and your father, who was a friend of my father's, as you know, heard of it through the newspapers. The reason why he did not mention it to you was that I asked him not to, because I wanted to be the first to tell you of events . . . so painful to myself."

Their hands met and clasped. He knew that every one of his words would find a ready listener; and, after a brief pause, he continued:

"My father was one of those men who compel the sympathy and even the affection of all who know them. He had a generous, enthusiastic, attractive nature and an unfailing good-humor, took a passionate interest in any fine cause and any fine spectacle, loved life and enjoyed it with a sort of precipitate haste. He enlisted in 1870 as a volunteer, earned his lieutenant's commission on the battlefield and found the soldier's heroic existence so well suited to his tastes that he volunteered a second time for Tonkin, and a third to take part in the conquest of Madagascar. . . . On his return from this campaign, in which he was promoted to captain and received the Legion of Honor, he married. Six years later he was a widower."

"You were like me, Paul," said Élisabeth. "You hardly enjoyed the happiness of knowing your mother."

"No, for I was only four years old. But my father, who felt my mother's death most cruelly, bestowed all his affection upon me. He made a point of personally giving me my early education. He left nothing undone to perfect my physical training and to make a strong and plucky lad of me. I loved him with all my heart. To this day I cannot think of him without genuine emotion. . . . When I was eleven years old, I accompanied him on a journey through France, which he had put off for years because he wanted me to take it with him at an age when I could understand its full meaning. It was a pilgrimage to the identical places and along the roads where he had fought during the terrible year."

"Did your father believe in the possibility of another war?"

"Yes; and he wanted to prepare me for it. 'Paul,' he said, 'I have no doubt that one day you will be facing the same enemy whom I fought against. From this moment pay no attention to any fine words of peace that you may hear, but hate that enemy with all the hatred of which you are capable. Whatever people may say, he is a barbarian, a vain-glorious, bloodthirsty brute, a beast of prey. He crushed us once and he will not rest content until he has crushed us again and, this time, for good. When that day comes, Paul, remember all the journeys which we have made together. Those which you will take will mark so many triumphant stages, I am sure of it. But never forget the names of these places, Paul; never let your joy in victory wipe out their names of sorrow and humiliation: Froeschwiller, Mars-la-Tour, Saint-Privat and the rest. Mind, Paul, and remember!' And he then smiled. 'But why should I trouble? He himself, the enemy, will make it his business to arouse hatred in the hearts of those who have forgotten and those who have not seen. Can he change? Not he! You'll see, Paul, you'll see. Nothing that I can say to you will equal the terrible reality. They are monsters.'"

Paul Delroze ceased. His wife asked him a little timidly:

"Do you think your father was absolutely right?"

"He may have been influenced by cruel recollections that were too recent in his memory. I have traveled a good deal in Germany, I have even lived there, and I believe that the state of men's minds has altered. I confess, therefore, that I sometimes find a difficulty in understanding my father's words. And yet . . . and yet they very often disturb me. And then what happened afterwards is so inexplicable."

The carriage had slackened its pace. The road was rising slowly towards the hills that overhang the Liseron Valley. The sun was setting in the direction of Corvigny. They passed a diligence, laden with trunks, and two motor cars crowded with passengers and luggage. A picket of cavalry galloped across the fields.

"Let's get out and walk," said Paul Delroze.

They followed the carriage on foot; and Paul continued:

"The rest of what I have to tell you, Élisabeth, stands out in my memory in very precise details, that seem to emerge as though from a thick fog in which I cannot see a thing. For instance, I just know that, after this part of our journey, we were to go from Strasburg to the Black Forest. Why our plans were changed I cannot tell. . . . I can see myself one morning in the station at Strasburg, stepping into the train for the Vosges . . . yes, for the Vosges. . . . My father kept on reading a letter which he had just received and which seemed to gratify him. The letter may have affected his arrangements; I don't know. We lunched in the train. There was a storm brewing, it was very hot and I fell asleep, so that all I can remember is a little German town where we hired two bicycles and left our bags in the cloak-room. It's all very vague in my mind. We rode across the country."

"But don't you remember what the country was like?"

"No, all I know is that suddenly my father said: 'There, Paul, we're crossing the frontier; we're in France now.' Later on—I can't say how long after—he stopped to ask his road of a peasant, who showed him a short-cut through the woods. But the road and the short-cut are nothing more in my mind than an impenetrable darkness in which my thoughts are buried. . . . Then, all of a sudden, the darkness is rent and I see, with astonishing plainness, a glade in the wood, tall trees, velvety moss and an old chapel. And the rain falls in great, thick drops, and my father says, 'Let's take shelter, Paul.' Oh, how I remember the sound of his voice and how exactly I picture the little chapel, with its walls green with damp! We went and put our bicycles under shelter at the back, where the roof projected a little way beyond the choir. Just then the sound of a conversation reached us from the inside and we heard the grating of a door that opened round the corner. Some one came out and said, in German, 'There's no one here. Let us make haste.' At that moment we were coming round the chapel, intending to go in by this side door; and it so happened that my father, who was leading the way, suddenly found himself in the presence of the man who had spoken in German. Both of them stepped back, the stranger apparently very much annoyed and my father astounded at the unexpected meeting. For a second or two, perhaps, they stood looking at each other without moving. I heard my father say, under his breath, 'Is it possible? The Emperor?' And I myself, surprised as I was at the words, had not a doubt of it, for I had often seen the Kaiser's portrait; the man in front of us was the German Emperor."

"The German Emperor?" echoed Élisabeth. "You can't mean that!"

"Yes, the Emperor in France! He quickly lowered his head and turned the velvet collar of his great, flowing cape right up to the brim of his hat, which was pulled down over his eyes. He looked towards the chapel. A lady came out, followed by a man whom I hardly saw, a sort of servant. The lady was tall, a young woman still, dark and rather good-looking. . . . The Emperor seized her arm with absolute violence and dragged her away, uttering angry words which we were unable to hear. They took the road by which we had come, the road leading to the frontier. The servant had hurried into the woods and was walking on ahead. 'This really is a queer adventure,' said my father, laughing. 'What on earth is William doing here? Taking the risk in broad daylight, too! I wonder if the chapel possesses some artistic interest. Come and see, Paul.' . . . We went in. A dim light made its way through a window black with dust and cobwebs. But this dim light was enough to show us some stunted pillars and bare walls and not a thing that seemed to deserve the honor of an imperial visit, as my father put it, adding, 'It's quite clear that William came here as a tripper, at hazard, and that he is very cross at having his escapade discovered. I expect the lady who was with him told him that he was running no danger. That would account for his irritation and his reproaches.'"

Paul broke off again. Élisabeth nestled up against him timidly. Presently he continued:

"It's curious, isn't it, Élisabeth, that all these little details, which really were comparatively unimportant for a boy of my age, should have been recorded faithfully in my mind, whereas so many other and much more essential facts have left no trace at all. However, I am telling you all this just as if I still had it before my eyes and as if the words were still sounding in my ears. And at this very moment I can see, as plainly as I saw her at the moment when we left the chapel, the Emperor's companion coming back and crossing the glade with a hurried step; and I can hear her say to my father, 'May I ask a favor of you, monsieur?' She had been running and was out of breath, but did not wait for him to answer and at once added, 'The gentleman you saw would like to speak to you.' This was said in perfect French without the least accent. . . . My father hesitated. But his hesitation seemed to shock her as though it were an unspeakable offense against the person who had sent her; and she said, in a harsher tone, 'Surely you do not mean to refuse!' 'Why not?' said my father, with obvious impatience. 'I am not here to receive orders.' She restrained herself and said, 'It is not an order, it is a wish.' 'Very well,' said my father, 'I will agree to the interview. I will wait for your friend here.' She seemed shocked. 'No, no,' she said, 'you must . . .' 'I must put myself out, must I?' cried my father, in a loud voice. 'You expect me to cross the frontier to where somebody is condescending to expect me? I am sorry, madam, but I will not consent to that. Tell your friend that if he fears an indiscretion on my part he can set his mind at rest. Come along, Paul.' He took off his hat to the lady and bowed. But she barred his way: 'No, no,' she said, 'you must do what I ask. What is a promise of discretion worth? The thing must be settled one way or the other; and you yourself will admit. . . .' Those were the last words I heard. She was standing opposite my father in a violent and hostile attitude. Her face was distorted with an expression of fierceness that terrified me. Oh, why did I not foresee what was going to happen? . . . But I was so young! And it all came so quickly! . . . She walked up to my father and, so to speak, forced him back to the foot of a large tree, on the right of the chapel. They raised their voices. She made a threatening gesture. He began to laugh. And suddenly, immediately, she whipped out a knife—I can see the blade now, flashing through the darkness—and stabbed him in the chest, twice . . . twice, there, full in the chest. My father fell to the ground."

Paul Delroze stopped, pale with the memory of the crime.

"Oh," faltered Élisabeth, "your father was murdered? . . . My poor Paul, my poor darling!" And in a voice of anguish she asked, "What happened next, Paul? Did you cry out?"

"I shouted, I rushed towards him, but a hand caught me in an irresistible grip. It was the man, the servant, who had darted out of the woods and seized me. I saw his knife raised above my head. I felt a terrible blow on my shoulder. Then I also fell."

CHAPTER II
THE LOCKED ROOM

The carriage stood waiting for them a little way ahead. They had sat down by the roadside on reaching the upland at the top of the ascent. The green, undulating valley of the Liseron opened up before them, with its little winding river escorted by two white roads which followed its every turn. Behind them, under the setting sun, some three hundred feet below, lay the clustering mass of Corvigny. Two miles in front of them rose the turrets of Ornequin and the ruins of the old castle.

Terrified by Paul's story, Élisabeth was silent for a time. Then she said:

"Oh, Paul, how terrible it all is! Were you very badly hurt?"

"I can remember nothing until the day when I woke up in a room which I did not know and saw a nun and an old lady, a cousin of my father's, who were nursing me. It was the best room of an inn somewhere between Belfort and the frontier. Twelve days before, at a very early hour in the morning, the innkeeper had found two bodies, all covered with blood, which had been laid there during the night. One of the bodies was quite cold. It was my poor father's. I was still breathing, but very slightly. . . . I had a long convalescence, interrupted by relapses and fits of delirium, in which I tried to make my escape. My old cousin, the only relation I had left, showed me the most wonderful and devoted kindness. Two months later she took me home with her. I was very nearly cured of my wound, but so greatly affected by my father's death and by the frightful circumstances surrounding it that it was several years before I recovered my health completely. As to the tragedy itself. . . ."

"Well?" asked Élisabeth, throwing her arm round her husband's neck, with an eager movement of protection.

"Well, they never succeeded in fathoming the mystery. And yet the police conducted their investigations zealously and scrupulously, trying to verify the only information which they were able to employ, that which I gave them. All their efforts failed. You know, my information was very vague. Apart from what had happened in the glade and in front of the chapel, I knew nothing. I could not tell them where to find the chapel, nor where to look for it, nor in what part of the country the tragedy had occurred."

"But still you had taken a journey, you and your father, to reach that part of the country; and it seems to me that, by tracing your road back to your departure from Strasburg. . . ."

"Well, of course they did their best to follow up that track; and the French police, not content with calling in the aid of the German police, sent their shrewdest detectives to the spot. But this is exactly what afterwards, when I was of an age to think out things, struck me as so strange: not a single trace was found of our stay at Strasburg. You quite understand? Not a trace of any kind. Now, if there was one thing of which I was absolutely certain, it was that we had spent at least two days and nights at Strasburg. The magistrate who had the case in hand, looking upon me as a child and one who had been badly knocked about and upset, came to the conclusion that my memory must be at fault. But I knew that this was not so; I knew it then and I know it still."

"What then, Paul?"

"Well, I cannot help seeing a connection between the total elimination of undeniable facts—facts easily checked or reconstructed, such as the visit of a Frenchman and his son to Strasburg, their railway journey, the leaving of their luggage in the cloak-room of a town in Alsace, the hiring of a couple of bicycles—and this main fact, that the Emperor was directly, yes, directly mixed up in the business."

"But this connection must have been as obvious to the magistrate's mind as to yours, Paul."

"No doubt; but neither the examining magistrate nor any of his colleagues and the other officials who took my evidence was willing to admit the Emperor's presence in Alsace on that day."

"Why not?"

"Because the German newspapers stated that he was in Frankfort at that very hour."

"In Frankfort?"

"Of course, he is stated to be wherever he commands and never at a place where he does not wish his presence known. At any rate, on this point also I was accused of being in error and the inquiry was thwarted by an assemblage of obstacles, impossibilities, lies and alibis which, to my mind, revealed the continuous and all-powerful action of an unlimited authority. There is no other explanation. Just think: how can two French subjects put up at a Strasburg hotel without having their names entered in the visitors' book? Well, whether because the book was destroyed or a page torn out, no record whatever of the names was found. So there was one proof, one clue gone. As for the hotel proprietor and waiters, the railway booking clerks and porters, the man who owned the bicycles: these were so many subordinates, so many accomplices, all of whom received orders to be silent; and not one of them disobeyed."

"But afterwards, Paul, you must have made your own search?"

"I should think I did! Four times since I came of age I have been over the whole frontier from Switzerland to Luxemburg, from Belfort to Longwy, questioning the inhabitants, studying the country. I have spent hours and hours in cudgeling my brains in the vain hope of extracting the slightest recollection that would have given me a gleam of light. But all without result. There was not one fresh glimmer amid all that darkness. Only three pictures showed through the dense fog of the past, pictures of the place and the things which witnessed the crime: the trees in the glade, the old chapel and the path leading through the woods. And then there was the figure of the Emperor and . . . the figure of the woman who killed my father."

Paul had lowered his voice. His face was distorted with grief and loathing.

"As for her," he went on, "if I live to be a hundred, I shall see her before my eyes as something standing out in all its details under the full light of day. The shape of her lips, the expression of her eyes, the color of her hair, the special character of her walk, the rhythm of her movements, the outline of her body: all this is recorded within myself, not as a vision which I summon up at will, but as something that forms part of my very being. It is as though, during my delirium, all the mysterious powers of my brain had collaborated to assimilate entirely those hateful memories. There was a time when all this was a morbid obsession: nowadays, I suffer only at certain hours, when the night is coming in and I am alone. My father was murdered; and the woman who murdered him is alive, unpunished, happy, rich, honored, pursuing her work of hatred and destruction."

"Would you know her again if you saw her, Paul?"

"Would I know her again! I should know her among a thousand. Even if she were disfigured by age, I should discover in the wrinkles of the old woman that she had become the face of the younger woman who stabbed my father to death on that September evening. Know her again! Why, I noticed the very shade of the dress she wore! It seems incredible, but there it is. A gray dress, with a black lace scarf over the shoulders; and here, in the bodice, by way of a brooch, a heavy cameo, set in a gold snake with ruby eyes. You see, Élisabeth, I have not forgotten and I never shall forget."

He ceased. Élisabeth was crying. The past which her husband had revealed to her was filling her with the same sense of horror and bitterness. He drew her to him and kissed her on the forehead.

"You are right not to forget," she said. "The murder will be punished because it has to be punished. But you must not let your life be subject to these memories of hatred. There are two of us now and we love each other. Let us look towards the future."

The Château d'Ornequin is a handsome sixteenth century building of simple design, with four peaked turrets, tall windows with denticulated pinnacles and a light balustrade projecting above the first story. The esplanade is formed by well-kept lawns which surround the courtyard and lead on the right and left to gardens, woods and orchards. One side of these lawns ends in a broad terrace overlooking the valley of the Liseron. On this terrace, in a line with the house, stand the majestic ruins of a four-square castle-keep.

The whole wears a very stately air. The estate, surrounded by farms and fields, demands active and careful working for its maintenance. It is one of the largest in the department.

Seventeen years before, at the sale held upon the death of the last Baron d'Ornequin, Élisabeth's father, the Comte d'Andeville, bought it at his wife's desire. He had been married for five years and had resigned his commission in the cavalry in order to devote himself entirely to the woman he loved. A chance journey brought them to Ornequin just as the sale, which had hardly been advertised in the local press, was about to be held. Hermine d'Andeville fell in love with the house and the domain; and the Count, who was looking for an estate whose management would occupy his spare time effected the purchase through his lawyer by private treaty.

During the winter that followed, he directed from Paris the work of restoration which was necessitated by the state of disrepair in which the former owner had left the house. M. d'Andeville wished it to be not only comfortable but also elegant; and, little by little, he sent down all the tapestries, pictures, objects of art and knicknacks that adorned his house in Paris.

They were not able to take up their residence until August. They then spent a few delightful weeks with their dear Élisabeth, at this time four years old, and their son, Bernard, a lusty boy to whom the Countess had given birth that same year. Hermine d'Andeville was devoted to her children and never went beyond the confines of the park. The Count looked after his farms and shot over his coverts, accompanied by Jérôme, his gamekeeper, a worthy Alsatian, who had been in the late owner's service and who knew every yard of the estate.

At the end of October, the Countess took cold; the illness that followed was pretty serious; and the Comte d'Andeville decided to take her and the children to the south. A fortnight later she had a relapse; and in three days she was dead.

The Count experienced the despair which makes a man feel that life is over and that, whatever happens, he will never again know the sense of joy nor even an alleviation of any sort. He lived not so much for the sake of his children as to cherish within himself the cult of her whom he had lost and to perpetuate a memory which now became the sole reason of his existence.

He was unable to return to the Château d'Ornequin, where he had known too perfect a happiness; on the other hand, he would not have strangers live there; and he ordered Jérôme to keep the doors and shutters closed and to lock up the Countess' boudoir and bedroom in such a way that no one could ever enter. Jérôme was also to let the farms and to collect the tenants' rents.

This break with the past was not enough to satisfy the Count. It seems strange in a man who existed only for the sake of his wife's memory, but everything that reminded him of her—familiar objects, domestic surroundings, places and landscapes—became a torture to him; and his very children filled him with a sense of discomfort which he was unable to overcome. He had an elder sister, a widow, living in the country, at Chaumont. He placed his daughter Élisabeth and his son Bernard in her charge and went abroad.

Aunt Aline was the most devoted and unselfish of women; and under her care Élisabeth enjoyed a grave, studious and affectionate childhood in which her heart developed together with her mind and her character. She received the education almost of a boy, together with a strong moral discipline. At the age of twenty, she had grown into a tall, capable, fearless girl, whose face, inclined by nature to be melancholy, sometimes lit up with the fondest and most innocent of smiles. It was one of those faces which reveal beforehand the pangs and raptures held in store by fate. The tears were never far from her eyes, which seemed as though troubled by the spectacle of life. Her hair, with its bright curls, lent a certain gaiety to her appearance.

At each visit that the Comte d'Andeville paid his daughter between his wanderings he fell more and more under her charm. He took her one winter to Spain and the next to Italy. It was in this way that she became acquainted with Paul Delroze at Rome and met him again at Naples and Syracuse, from which town Paul accompanied the d'Andevilles on a long excursion through Sicily. The intimacy thus formed attached the two young people by a bond of which they did not realize the full strength till the time came for parting.

Like Élisabeth, Paul had been brought up in the country and, again like her, by a fond kinswoman who strove, by dint of loving care, to make him forget the tragedy of his childhood. Though oblivion failed to come, at any rate she succeeded in continuing his father's work and in making of Paul a manly and industrious lad, interested in books, life and the doings of mankind. He went to school and, after performing his military service, spent two years in Germany, studying some of his favorite industrial and mechanical subjects on the spot.

Tall and well set up, with his black hair flung back from his rather thin face, with its determined chin, he made an impression of strength and energy.

His meeting with Élisabeth revealed to him a world of ideas and emotions which he had hitherto disdained. For him as for her it was a sort of intoxication mingled with amazement. Love created in them two new souls, light and free as air, whose ready enthusiasm and expansiveness formed a sharp contrast with the habits enforced upon them by the strict tendency of their lives. On his return to France he asked for Élisabeth's hand in marriage and obtained her consent.

On the day of the marriage contract, three days before the wedding, the Comte d'Andeville announced that he would add the Château d'Ornequin to Élisabeth's dowry. The young couple decided that they would live there and that Paul should look about in the valleys of the neighboring manufacturing district for some works which he could buy and manage.

They were married on Thursday, the 30th of July, at Chaumont. It was a quiet wedding, because of the rumors of war, though the Comte d'Andeville, on the strength of information to which he attached great credit, declared that no war would take place. At the breakfast in which the two families took part, Paul made the acquaintance of Bernard d'Andeville, Élisabeth's brother, a schoolboy of barely seventeen, whose holidays had just begun. Paul took to him, because of his frank bearing and high spirits; and it was arranged that Bernard should join them in a few days at Ornequin. At one o'clock Élisabeth and Paul left Chaumont by train. They were going hand-in-hand to the château where the first years of their marriage were to be spent and perhaps all that happy and peaceful future which opens up before the dazzling eyes of lovers.

It was half-past six o'clock when they saw Jérôme's wife standing at the foot of the steps. Rosalie was a stout, motherly body with ruddy, mottled cheeks and a cheerful face.

Before dining, they took a hurried turn in the garden and went over the house. Élisabeth could not contain her emotion. Though there were no memories to excite her, she seemed, nevertheless, to rediscover something of the mother whom she had known for such a little while, whose features she could not remember and who had here spent the last happy days of her life. For her, the shade of the dead woman still trod those garden paths. The great, green lawns exhaled a special fragrance. The leaves on the trees rustled in the wind with a whisper which she seemed already to have heard in that same spot and at the same hour of the day, with her mother listening beside her.

"You seem depressed, Élisabeth," said Paul.

"Not depressed, but unsettled. I feel as though my mother were welcoming us to this place where she thought she was to live and where we have come with the same intention. And I somehow feel anxious. It is as though I were a stranger, an intruder, disturbing the rest and peace of the house. Only think! My mother has been here all alone for such a time! My father would never come here; and I was telling myself that we have no right to come here either, with our indifference for everything that is not ourselves."

Paul smiled:

"Élisabeth, my darling, you are simply feeling that impression of uneasiness which one always feels on arriving at a new place in the evening."

"I don't know," she said. "I daresay you are right. . . . But I can't shake off the uneasiness; and that is so unlike me. Do you believe in presentiments, Paul?"

"No, do you?"

"No, I don't either," she said, laughing and giving him her lips.

They were surprised to find that the rooms of the house looked as if they had been constantly inhabited. By the Count's orders, everything had remained as it was in the far-off days of Hermine d'Andeville. The knickknacks were there, in the same places, and every piece of embroidery, every square of lace, every miniature, all the handsome eighteenth century chairs, all the Flemish tapestry, all the furniture which the Count had collected in the old days to add to the beauty of his house. They were thus entering from the first into a charming and home-like setting.

After dinner they returned to the gardens, where they strolled to and fro in silence, with their arms entwined round each other's waists. From the terrace they looked down upon the dark valley, with a few lights gleaming here and there. The old castle-keep raised its massive ruins against a pale sky, in which a remnant of vague light still lingered.

"Paul," said Élisabeth, in a low voice, "did you notice, as we went over the house, a door closed with a great padlock?"

"In the middle of the chief corridor, near your bedroom, you mean?"

"Yes. That was my poor mother's boudoir. My father insisted that it should be locked, as well as the bedroom leading out of it; and Jérôme put a padlock on the door and sent him the key. No one has set foot in it since. It is just as my mother left it. All her own things—her unfinished work, her books—are there. And on the wall facing the door, between the two windows that have always been kept shut, is her portrait, which my father had ordered a year before of a great painter of his acquaintance, a full-length portrait which, I understand, is the very image of her. Her prie-Dieu is beside it. This morning my father gave me the key of the boudoir and I promised him that I would kneel down on the prie-Dieu and say a prayer before the portrait of the mother whom I hardly knew and whose features I cannot imagine, for I never even had a photograph of her."

"Really? How was that?"

"You see, my father loved my mother so much that, in obedience to a feeling which he himself was unable to explain, he wished to be alone in his recollection of her. He wanted his memories to be hidden deep down in himself, so that nothing would remind him of her except his own will and his grief. He almost begged my pardon for it this morning, said that perhaps he had done me a wrong; and that is why he wants us to go together, Paul, on this first evening, and pray before the picture of my poor dead mother."

"Let us go now, Élisabeth."

Her hand trembled in her husband's hand as they climbed the stairs to the first floor. Lamps had been lighted all along the passage. They stopped in front of a tall, wide door surmounted with gilded carvings.

"Unfasten the lock, Paul," said Élisabeth.

Her voice shook as she spoke. She handed him the key. He removed the padlock and seized the door-handle. But Élisabeth suddenly gripped her husband's arm:

"One moment, Paul, one moment! I feel so upset. This is the first time that I shall look on my mother's face . . . and you, my dearest, are beside me. . . . I feel as if I were becoming a little girl again."

"Yes," he said, pressing her hand passionately, "a little girl and a grown woman in one."

Comforted by the clasp of his hand, she released hers and whispered:

"We will go in now, Paul darling."

He opened the door and returned to the passage to take a lamp from a bracket on the wall and place it on the table. Meanwhile, Élisabeth had walked across the room and was standing in front of the picture. Her mother's face was in the shadow and she altered the position of the lamp so as to throw the full light upon it.

"How beautiful she is, Paul!"

He went up to the picture and raised his head. Élisabeth sank to her knees on the prie-Dieu. But presently, hearing Paul turn round, she looked up at him and was stupefied by what she saw. He was standing motionless, livid in the face, his eyes wide open, as though gazing at the most frightful vision.

"Paul," she cried, "what's the matter?"

He began to make for the door, stepping backwards, unable to take his eyes from the portrait of Hermine d'Andeville. He was staggering like a drunken man; and his arms beat the air around him.

"That . . . that . . ." he stammered, hoarsely.

"Paul," Élisabeth entreated, "what is it? What are you trying to say?"

"That . . . that is the woman who killed my father!"

CHAPTER III
THE CALL TO ARMS

The hideous accusation was followed by an awful silence. Élisabeth was now standing in front of her husband, striving to understand his words, which had not yet acquired their real meaning for her, but which hurt her as though she had been stabbed to the heart.

She moved towards him and, with her eyes in his, spoke in a voice so low that he could hardly hear:

"You surely can't mean what you said, Paul? The thing is too monstrous!"

He replied in the same tone:

"Yes, it is a monstrous thing. I don't believe it myself yet. I refuse to believe it."

"Then—it's a mistake, isn't it?—Confess it, you've made a mistake."

She implored him with all the distress that filled her being, as though she were hoping to make him yield. He fixed his eyes again on the accursed portrait, over his wife's shoulder, and shivered from head to foot:

"Oh, it is she!" he declared, clenching his fists. "It is she—I recognize her—it is the woman who killed my——"

A shock of protest ran through her body; and, beating her breast, she cried:

"My mother! My mother a murderess! My mother, whom my father used to worship and went on worshiping! My mother, who used to hold me on her knee and kiss me!—I have forgotten everything about her except that, her kisses and her caresses! And you tell me that she is a murderess!"

"It is true."

"Oh, Paul, you must not say anything so horrible! How can you be positive, such a long time after? You were only a child; and you saw so little of the woman . . . hardly a few minutes . . ."

"I saw more of her than it seems humanly possible to see," exclaimed Paul, loudly. "From the moment of the murder her image never left my sight. I have tried to shake it off at times, as one tries to shake off a nightmare; but I could not. And the image is there, hanging on the wall. As sure as I live, it is there; I know it as I should know your image after twenty years. It is she . . . why, look, on her breast, that brooch set in a gold snake! . . . a cameo, as I told you, and the snake's eyes . . . two rubies! . . . and the black lace scarf around the shoulders! It's she, I tell you, it's the woman I saw!"

A growing rage excited him to frenzy; and he shook his fist at the portrait of Hermine d'Andeville.

"Hush!" cried Élisabeth, under the torment of his words. "Hold your tongue! I won't allow you to . . ."

She tried to put her hand on his mouth to compel him to silence. But Paul made a movement of repulsion, as though he were shrinking from his wife's touch; and the movement was so abrupt and so instinctive that she fell to the ground sobbing while he, incensed, exasperated by his sorrow and hatred, impelled by a sort of terrified hallucination that drove him back to the door, shouted:

"Look at her! Look at her wicked mouth, her pitiless eyes! She is thinking of the murder! . . . I see her, I see her! . . . She goes up to my father . . . she leads him away . . . she raises her arm . . . and she kills him! . . . Oh, the wretched, monstrous woman! . . ."

He rushed from the room.

Paul spent the night in the park, running like a madman wherever the dark paths led him, or flinging himself, when tired out, on the grass and weeping, weeping endlessly.

Paul Delroze had known no suffering save from his memory of the murder, a chastened suffering which, nevertheless, at certain periods became acute until it smarted like a fresh wound. This time the pain was so great and so unexpected that, notwithstanding his usual self-mastery and his well-balanced mind, he utterly lost his head. His thoughts, his actions, his attitudes, the words which he yelled into the darkness were those of a man who has parted with his self-control.

One thought and one alone kept returning to his seething brain, in which his ideas and impressions whirled like leaves in the wind; one terrible thought:

"I know the woman who killed my father; and that woman's daughter is the woman whom I love."

Did he still love her? No doubt, he was desperately mourning a happiness which he knew to be shattered; but did he still love Élisabeth? Could he love Hermine d'Andeville's daughter?

When he went indoors at daybreak and passed Élisabeth's room, his heart beat no faster than before. His hatred of the murderess destroyed all else that might stir within him: love, affection, longing, or even the merest human pity.

The torpor into which he sank for a few hours relaxed his nerves a little, but did not change his mental attitude. Perhaps, on the contrary, and without even thinking about it, he was still more unwilling than before to meet Élisabeth. And yet he wanted to know, to ascertain, to gather all the essential particulars and to make quite certain before taking the resolve that would decide the great tragedy of his life in one way or another.

Above all, he must question Jérôme and his wife, whose evidence was of no small value, owing to the fact that they had known the Comtesse d'Andeville. Certain matters concerning the dates, for instance, might be cleared up forthwith.

He found them in their lodge, both of them greatly excited, Jérôme with a newspaper in his hand and Rosalie making gestures of dismay.

"It's settled, sir," cried Jérôme. "You can be sure of it: it's coming!"

"What?" asked Paul.

"Mobilization, sir, the call to arms. You'll see it does. I saw some gendarmes, friends of mine, and they told me. The posters are ready."

Paul remarked, absent-mindedly:

"The posters are always ready."

"Yes, but they're going to stick them up at once, you'll see, sir. Just look at the paper. Those swine—you'll forgive me, sir, but it's the only word for them—those swine want war. Austria would be willing to negotiate, but in the meantime the others have been mobilizing for several days. Proof is, they won't let you cross into their country any more. And worse: yesterday they destroyed a French railway station, not far from here, and pulled up the rails. Read it for yourself, sir!"

Paul skimmed through the stop-press telegrams, but, though he saw that they were serious, war seemed to him such an unlikely thing that he did not pay much attention to them.

"It'll be settled all right," he said. "That's just their way of talking, with their hand on the sword-hilt; but I can't believe . . ."

"You're wrong, sir," Rosalie muttered.

He no longer listened, thinking only of the tragedy of his fate and casting about for the best means of obtaining the necessary replies from Jérôme. But he was not able to contain himself any longer and he broached the subject frankly:

"I daresay you know, Jérôme, that madame and I have been to the Comtesse d'Andeville's room."

The statement produced an extraordinary effect upon the keeper and his wife, as though it had been a sacrilege to enter that room so long kept locked, the mistress' room, as they called it among themselves.

"You don't mean that, sir!" Rosalie blurted out.

And Jérôme added:

"No, of course not, for I sent the only key of the padlock, a safety-key it was, to Monsieur le Comte."

"He gave it us yesterday morning," said Paul.

And, without troubling further about their amazement, he proceeded straightaway to put his questions:

"There is a portrait of the Comtesse d'Andeville between the two windows. When was it hung there?"

Jérôme did not reply at once. He thought for a moment, looked at his wife, and then said:

"Why, that's easily answered. It was when Monsieur le Comte sent all his furniture to the house . . . before they moved in."

"When was that?"

Paul's agony was unendurable during the three or four seconds before the reply.

"Well?" he asked.

When the reply came at last it was decisive:

"Well, it was in the spring of 1898."

"Eighteen hundred and ninety-eight!"

Paul repeated the words in a dull voice: 1898 was the year of his father's murder!

Without stopping to reflect, with the coolness of an examining magistrate who does not swerve from the line which he has laid out, he asked:

"So the Comte and Comtesse d'Andeville arrived . . ."

"Monsieur le Comte and Madame le Comtesse arrived at the castle on the 28th of August, 1898, and left for the south on the 24th of October."

Paul now knew the truth, for his father was murdered on the 19th of September. And all the circumstances which depended on that truth, which explained it in its main details or which proceeded from it at once appeared to him. He remembered that his father was on friendly terms with the Comte d'Andeville. He said to himself that his father, in the course of his journey in Alsace, must have learnt that his friend d'Andeville was living in Lorraine and must have contemplated paying him a surprise visit. He reckoned up the distance between Ornequin and Strasburg, a distance which corresponded with the time spent in the train. And he asked:

"How far is this from the frontier?"

"Three miles and three-quarters, sir."

"On the other side, at no great distance, there's a little German town, is there not?"

"Yes, sir, Èbrecourt."

"Is there a short-cut to the frontier?"

"Yes, sir, for about half-way: a path at the other end of the park."

"Through the woods?"

"Through Monsieur le Comte's woods."

"And in those woods . . ."

To acquire total, absolute certainty, that certainty which comes not from an interpretation of the facts but from the facts themselves, which would stand out visible and palpable, all that he had to do was to put the last question: in those woods was not there a little chapel in the middle of a glade? Paul Delroze did not put the question. Perhaps he thought it too precise, perhaps he feared lest it should induce the gamekeeper to entertain thoughts and comparisons which the nature of the conversation was already sufficient to warrant. He merely asked:

"Was the Comtesse d'Andeville away at all during the six weeks which she spent at Ornequin? For two or three days, I mean?"

"No, sir, Madame le Comtesse never left the grounds."

"She kept to the park?"

"Yes, sir. Monsieur le Comte used to drive almost every afternoon to Corvigny or in the valley, but Madame la Comtesse never went beyond the park and the woods."

Paul knew what he wanted to know. Not caring what Jérôme and his wife might think, he did not trouble to find an excuse for his strange series of apparently disconnected questions. He left the lodge and walked away.

Eager though he was to complete his inquiry, he postponed the investigations which he intended to pursue outside the park. It was as though he dreaded to face the final proof, which had really become superfluous after those with which chance had supplied him. He therefore went back to the château and, at lunch-time, resolved to accept this inevitable meeting with Élisabeth. But his wife's maid came to him in the drawing-room and said that her mistress sent her excuses. Madame was not feeling very well and asked did monsieur mind if she took her lunch in her own room. He understood that she wished to leave him entirely free, refusing, on her side, to appeal to him on behalf of a mother whom she respected and, if necessary, submitting beforehand to whatever eventual decision her husband might make.

Lunching by himself under the eyes of the butler and footman waiting at table, he felt in the utmost depths of his heart that his happiness was gone and that Élisabeth and he, thanks to circumstances for which neither of them was responsible, had on the very day of their marriage become enemies whom no power on earth could bring together. Certainly, he bore her no hatred and did not reproach her with her mother's crime; but unconsciously he was angry with her, as for a fault, inasmuch as she was her mother's daughter.

For two hours after lunch he remained closeted with the portrait in the boudoir: a tragic interview which he wished to have with the murderess, so as to fill his eyes with her accursed image and give fresh strength to his memories. He examined every slightest detail. He studied the cameo, the swan with unfurled wings which it represented, the chasing of the gold snake that formed the setting, the position of the rubies and also the draping of the lace around the shoulders, not to speak of the shape of the mouth and the color of the hair and the outline of the face.

It was undoubtedly the woman whom he had seen that September evening. A corner of the picture bore the painter's signature; and underneath, on the frame, was a scroll with the inscription:

Portrait of the Comtesse H.

No doubt the portrait had been exhibited with that discreet reference to the Comtesse Hermine.

"Now, then," said Paul. "A few minutes more, and the whole past will come to life again. I have found the criminal; I have now only to find the place of the crime. If the chapel is there, in the woods, the truth will be complete."

He went for the truth resolutely. He feared it less now, because it could no longer escape his grasp. And yet how his heart beat, with great, painful throbs, and how he loathed the idea of taking the road leading to that other road along which his father had passed sixteen years before!

A vague movement of Jérôme's hand had told him which way to go. He crossed the park in the direction of the frontier, bearing to his left and passing a lodge. At the entrance to the woods was a long avenue of fir-trees down which he went. Four hundred yards farther it branched into three narrow avenues. Two of these proved to end in impenetrable thickets. The third led to the top of a mound, from which he descended, still keeping to his left, by another avenue of fir-trees.

In selecting this road, Paul realized that it was just this avenue of firs the appearance of which aroused in him, through some untold resemblance of shape and arrangement, memories clear enough to guide his steps. It ran straight ahead for some time and then took a sudden turn into a cluster of tall beeches whose leafy tops met overhead. Then the road sloped upwards; and, at the end of the dark tunnel through which he was walking, Paul perceived the glare of light that points to an open space.

The anguish of it all made his knees give way beneath him; and he had to make an effort to proceed. Was it the glade in which his father had received his death-blow? The more that luminous space became revealed to his eyes, the more did he feel penetrated with a profound conviction. As in the room with the portrait, the past was recovering the very aspect of the truth in and before him.

It was the same glade, surrounded by a ring of trees that presented the same picture and covered with a carpet of grass and moss which the same paths divided as of old. The same glimpse of sky was above him, outlined by the capricious masses of foliage. And there, on his left, guarded by two yew-trees which Paul recognized, was the chapel.

The chapel! The little old massive chapel, whose lines had etched themselves like furrows into his brain! Trees grow, become taller, alter their form. The appearance of a glade is liable to change. Its paths will sometimes interlock in a different fashion. A man's memory can play him a trick. But a building of granite and cement is immutable. It takes centuries to give it the green-gray color that is the mark which time sets upon the stone; and this bloom of age never alters. The chapel that stood there, displaying a grimy-paned rose-window in its east front, was undoubtedly that from which the German Emperor had stepped, followed by the woman who, ten minutes later, committed the murder.

Paul walked to the door. He wanted to revisit the place in which his father had spoken to him for the last time. It was a moment of tense emotion. The same little roof which had sheltered their bicycles projected at the back; and the door was the same, with its great rusty clamps and bars.

He stood on the single step that led to it, raised the latch and pushed the door. But as he was about to enter, two men, hidden in the shadow on either side, sprang at him.

One of them aimed a revolver full in his face. By some miracle, Paul noticed the gleaming barrel of the weapon just in time to stoop before the bullet could strike him. A second shot rang out, but he had hustled the man and now snatched the revolver from his hand, while his other aggressor threatened him with a dagger. He stepped backwards out of the chapel, with outstretched arm, and twice pulled the trigger. Each time there was a click but no shot. The mere fact, however, of his firing at the two scoundrels terrified them, and they turned tail and made off as fast as they could.

Bewildered by the suddenness of the attack, Paul stood for a second irresolute. Then he fired at the fugitives again, but to no purpose. The revolver, which was obviously loaded in only two chambers, clicked but did not go off.

He then started running after his assailants; and he remembered that long ago the Emperor and his companion, on leaving the chapel, had taken the same direction, which was evidently that of the frontier.

Almost at the same moment the men, seeing themselves pursued, plunged into the wood and slipped in among the trees; but Paul, who was swifter of foot, rapidly gained ground on them, all the more so as he had gone round a hollow filled with bracken and brambles into which the others had ventured.

Suddenly one of them gave a shrill whistle, probably a warning to some accomplice. Soon after they disappeared behind a line of extremely dense bushes. When he had passed through these, Paul saw at a distance of sixty yards before him a high wall which seemed to shut in the woods on every side. The men were half-way to it; and he perceived that they were making straight for a part of the wall containing a small door.

Paul put on a spurt so as to reach the door before they had time to open it. The bare ground enabled him to increase his speed, whereas the men, who were obviously tired, had reduced theirs.

"I've got them, the ruffians!" he murmured. "I shall at last know . . ."

A second whistle sounded, followed by a guttural shout. He was now within twenty yards of them and could hear them speak.

"I've got them, I've got them!" he repeated, with fierce delight.

And he made up his mind to strike one of them in the face with the barrel of his revolver and to spring at the other's throat.

But, before they even reached the wall, the door was pushed open from the outside and a third man appeared and let them through.

Paul flung away the revolver; and his impetus was such and the effort which he made so great that he managed to seize the door and draw it to him.

The door gave way. And what he then saw scared him to such a degree that he started backwards and did not even dream of defending himself against this fresh attack. The third man—Oh, hideous nightmare! Could it moreover be anything but a nightmare?—the third ruffian was raising a knife against him; and Paul knew his face . . . it was a face resembling the one which he had seen before, a man's face and not a woman's, but the same sort of face, undoubtedly the same sort: a face marked by fifteen additional years and by an even harder and more wicked expression, but the same sort of face, the same sort!

And the man stabbed Paul, even as the woman of fifteen years ago, even as she who was since dead had stabbed Paul's father.

Paul Delroze staggered, but rather as the result of the nervous shock caused by the sudden appearance of this ghost of the past; for the blade of the dagger, striking the button on the shoulder-strap of his shooting-jacket, broke into splinters. Dazed and misty-eyed, he heard the sound of the door closing, the grating of the key in the lock and lastly the hum of a motor car starting on the other side of the wall. When Paul recovered from his torpor there was nothing left for him to do. The man and his two confederates were out of reach.

Besides, for the moment he was utterly absorbed in the mystery of the likeness between the figure from the past and that which he had just seen. He could think of but one thing:

"The Comtesse d'Andeville is dead; and here she is revived under the aspect of a man whose face is the very face which she would have to-day. Is it the face of some relation, of a brother of whom I never heard, a twin perhaps?"

And he reflected:

"After all, am I not mistaken? Am I not the victim of an hallucination, which would be only natural in the crisis through which I am passing? How do I know for certain that there is any connection between the present and the past? I must have a proof."

The proof was ready to his hand; and it was so strong that Paul was not able to doubt for much longer. He caught sight of the remains of the dagger in the grass and picked up the handle. On it four letters were engraved as with a red-hot iron: an H, an E, an R and an M.

H, E, R, M; the first four letters of Hermine! . . . At this moment, while he was staring at the letters which were to him so full of meaning, at this moment, a moment which Paul was never to forget, the bell of a church nearby began to ring in the most unusual manner: a regular, monotonous, uninterrupted ringing, which sounded at once brisk and unspeakably sinister.

"The tocsin," he muttered to himself, without attaching the full sense to the word. And he added: "A fire somewhere, I expect."

A few minutes later Paul had succeeded in climbing over the wall by means of the projecting branches of a tree. He found a further stretch of woods, crossed by a forest road. He followed the tracks of a motor car along this road and reached the frontier within an hour.

A squad of German constabulary were sitting round the foot of the frontier post; and he saw a white road with Uhlans trotting along it. At the end of it was a cluster of red roofs and gardens. Was this the little town where his father and he had hired their bicycles that day, the little town of Èbrecourt?

The melancholy bell never ceased. He noticed that the sound came from France; also that another bell was ringing somewhere, likewise in France, and a third from the direction of the Liseron; and all three on the same hurried note, as though sending forth a wild appeal around them.

He repeated, anxiously:

"The tocsin! . . . The alarm! . . . And it's being passed on from church to church. . . . Can it mean that . . ."

But he drove away the terrifying thought. No, his ears were misleading him; or else it was the echo of a single bell thrown back in the hollow valleys and ringing over the plains.

Meanwhile he was gazing at the white road which issued from the little German town, and he observed that a constant stream of horsemen was arriving there and spreading across-country. Also a detachment of French dragoons appeared on the ridge of a hill. The officer in command scanned the horizon through his field-glasses and then trotted off with his men.

Thereupon, unable to go any farther, Paul walked back to the wall which he had climbed and found that the wall was prolonged around the whole of the estate, including the woods and the park. He learnt besides from an old peasant that it was built some twelve years ago, which explained why Paul had never found the chapel in the course of his explorations along the frontier. Once only, he now remembered, some one had told him of a chapel; but it was one situated inside a private estate; and his suspicions had not been aroused.

While thus following the road that skirted the property, he came nearer to the village of Ornequin, whose church suddenly rose at the end of a clearing in the wood. The bell, which he had not heard for the last moment or two, now rang out again with great distinctness. It was the bell of Ornequin. It was frail, shrill, poignant as a lament and more solemn than a passing-bell, for all its hurry and lightness.

Paul walked towards the sound. A charming village, all aflower with geraniums and Marguerites, stood gathered about its church. Silent groups were studying a white notice posted on the Mayor's office. Paul stepped forward and read the heading:

"Mobilization Order."

At any other period of his life these words would have struck him with all their gloomy and terrific meaning. But the crisis through which he was passing was too powerful to allow room for any great emotion within him. He scarcely even contemplated the unavoidable consequences of the proclamation. Very well, the country was mobilizing: the mobilization would begin at midnight. . . . Very well, every one must go; he would go. . . . And this assumed in his mind the form of so imperative an act, the proportions of a duty which so completely exceeded every minor obligation and every petty individual need that he felt, on the contrary, a sort of relief at thus receiving from the outside the order that dictated his conduct. There was no hesitation possible. His duty lay before him: he must go.

Go? In that case why not go at once? What was the use of returning to the house, seeing Élisabeth again, seeking a painful and futile explanation, granting or refusing a forgiveness which his wife did not ask of him, but which the daughter of Hermine d'Andeville did not deserve?

In front of the principal inn a diligence stood waiting, marked, "Corvigny-Ornequin Railway Service." A few passengers were getting in. Without giving a further thought to a position which events were developing in their own way, he climbed into the diligence.

At the Corvigny railway station he was told that his train would not leave for half an hour and that it was the last, as the evening train, which connected with the night express on the main line, was not running. Paul took his ticket and then asked his way to the jobmaster of the village. He found that the man owned two motor cars and arranged with him to have the larger of the two sent at once to the Château d'Ornequin and placed at Mme. Paul Delroze's disposal.

And he wrote a short note to his wife:

"Élisabeth:

"Circumstances are so serious that I must ask you to leave Ornequin. The trains have become very uncertain; and I am sending you a motor car which will take you to-night to your aunt at Chaumont. I suppose that the servants will go with you and that, if there should be war (which seems to me very unlikely, in spite of everything), Jérôme and Rosalie will shut up the house and go to Corvigny.

"As for me, I am joining my regiment. Whatever the future may hold in store for us, Élisabeth, I shall never forget the woman who was my bride and who bears my name.

"Paul Delroze."

CHAPTER IV
A LETTER FROM ÉLISABETH

It was nine o'clock; there was no holding the position; and the colonel was furious.

He had brought his regiment in the middle of the night—it was in the first month of the war, on the 22nd of August, 1914—to the junction of those three roads one of which ran from Belgian Luxemburg. The Germans had taken possession of the lines of the frontier, seven or eight miles away, on the day before. The general commanding the division had expressly ordered that they were to hold the enemy in check until mid-day, that is to say, until the whole division was able to come up with them. The regiment was supported by a battery of seventy-fives.

The colonel had drawn up his men in a dip in the ground. The battery was likewise hidden. And yet, at the first gleams of dawn, both regiment and battery were located by the enemy and lustily shelled.

They moved a mile or more to the right. Five minutes later the shells fell and killed half a dozen men and two officers.

A fresh move was effected, followed in ten minutes by a fresh attack. The colonel pursued his tactics. In an hour there were thirty men killed or wounded. One of the guns was destroyed. And it was only nine o'clock.

"Damn it all!" cried the colonel. "How can they spot us like this? There's witchcraft in it."

He was hiding, with his majors, the captain of artillery and a few dispatch-riders, behind a bank from above which the eye took in a rather large stretch of undulating upland. At no great distance, on the left, was an abandoned village, with some scattered farms in front of it, and there was not an enemy to be seen in all that deserted extent of country. There was nothing to show where the hail of shells was coming from. The seventy-fives had "searched" one or two points with no result. The firing continued.

"Three more hours to hold out," growled the colonel. "We shall do it; but we shall lose a quarter of the regiment."

At that moment a shell whistled between the officers and the dispatch-riders and plumped down into the ground. All sprang back, awaiting the explosion. But one man, a corporal, ran forward, lifted the shell and examined it.

"You're mad, corporal!" roared the colonel. "Drop that shell and be quick about it."

The corporal replaced the projectile quietly in the hole which it had made; and then without hurrying, went up to the colonel, brought his heels together and saluted:

"Excuse me, sir, but I wanted to see by the fuse how far off the enemy's guns are. It's two miles and fifty yards. That may be worth knowing."

"By Jove! And suppose it had gone off?"

"Ah, well, sir, nothing venture, nothing have!"

"True, but, all the same, it was a bit thick! What's your name?"

"Paul Delroze, sir, corporal in the third company."

"Well, Corporal Delroze, I congratulate you on your pluck and I dare say you'll soon have your sergeant's stripes. Meanwhile, take my advice and don't do it again. . . ."

He was interrupted by the sudden bursting of a shrapnel-shell. One of the dispatch-riders standing near him fell, hit in the chest, and an officer staggered under the weight of the earth that spattered against him.

"Come," said the colonel, when things had restored themselves, "there's nothing to do but bow before the storm. Take the best shelter you can find; and let's wait."

Paul Delroze stepped forward once more.

"Forgive me, sir, for interfering in what's not my business; but we might, I think, avoid . . ."

"Avoid the peppering? Of course, I have only to change our position again. But, as we should be located again at once. . . . There, my lad, go back to your place."

Paul insisted:

"It might be a question, sir, not of changing our position, but of changing the enemy's fire."

"Really!" said the colonel, a little sarcastically, but nevertheless impressed by Paul's coolness. "And do you know a way of doing it?"

"Yes, sir."

"What do you mean?"

"Give me twenty minutes, sir, and by that time the shells will be falling in another direction."

The colonel could not help smiling:

"Capital! You'll make them drop where you please, I suppose?"

"Yes, sir."

"On that beet-field over there, fifteen hundred yards to the right?"

"Yes, sir."

The artillery-captain, who had been listening to the conversation, made a jest in his turn:

"While you are about it, corporal, as you have already given me the distance and I know the direction more or less, couldn't you give it to me exactly, so that I may lay my guns right and smash the German batteries?"

"That will be a longer job, sir, and much more difficult," said Paul. "Still, I'll try. If you don't mind examining the horizon, at eleven o'clock precisely, towards the frontier, I'll let off a signal."

"What sort of signal?"

"I don't know, sir. Three rockets, I expect."

"But your signal will be no use unless you send it off immediately above the enemy's position."

"Just so, sir."

"And, to do that, you'll have to know it."

"I shall, sir."

"And to get there."

"I shall get there, sir."

Paul saluted, turned on his heel and, before the officers had time either to approve or to object, he slipped along the foot of the slope at a run, plunged on the left down a sort of hollow way, with bristling edges of brambles, and disappeared from sight.

"That's a queer fellow," said the colonel. "I wonder what he really means to do."

The young soldier's pluck and decision disposed the colonel in his favor; and, though he felt only a limited confidence in the result of the enterprise, he could not help looking at his watch, time after time, during the minutes which he spent with his officers, behind the feeble rampart of a hay-stack. They were terrible minutes, in which the commanding officer did not think for a moment of the danger that threatened himself, but only of the danger of the men in his charge, whom he looked upon as children.

He saw them around him, lying at full length on the stubble, with their knapsacks over their heads, or snugly ensconced in the copses, or squatting in the hollows in the ground. The iron hurricane increased in violence. It came rushing down like a furious hail bent upon hastily completing its work of destruction. Men suddenly leapt to their feet, spun on their heels and fell motionless, amid the yells of the wounded, the shouts of the soldiers exchanging remarks and even jokes and, over everything, the incessant thunder of the bursting bomb-shells.

And then, suddenly, silence! Total, definite silence, an infinite lull in the air and on the ground, giving a sort of ineffable relief!

The colonel expressed his delight by bursting into a laugh:

"By Jupiter, Corporal Delroze knows his way about! The crowning achievement would be for the beet-field to be shelled, as he promised."

He had not finished speaking when a shell exploded fifteen hundred yards to the right, not in the beet-field, but a little in front of it. The second went too far. The third found the spot. And the bombardment began with a will.

There was something about the performance of the task which the corporal had set himself that was at once so astounding and so mathematically accurate that the colonel and his officers had hardly a doubt that he would carry it out to the end and that, notwithstanding the insurmountable obstacles, he would succeed in giving the signal agreed upon.

They never ceased sweeping the horizon with their field-glasses, while the enemy redoubled his efforts against the beet-field.

At five minutes past eleven, a red rocket went up. It appeared a good deal farther to the right than they would have suspected. And it was followed by two others.

Through his telescope the artillery-captain soon discovered a church-steeple that just showed above a valley which was itself invisible among the rise and fall of the plateau; and the spire of the steeple protruded so very little that it might well have been taken for a tree standing by itself. A rapid glance at the map showed that it was the village of Brumoy.

Knowing, from the shell examined by the corporal, the exact distance of the German batteries, the captain telephoned his instructions to his lieutenant. Half an hour later the German batteries were silenced; and as a fourth rocket had gone up the seventy-fives continued to bombard the church as well as the village and its immediate neighborhood.

At a little before twelve, the regiment was joined by a cyclists company riding ahead of the division. The order was given to advance at all costs.

The regiment advanced, encountering no resistance, as it approached Brumoy, except a few rifle shots. The enemy's rearguard was falling back.

The village was in ruins, with some of its houses still burning, and displayed a most incredible disorder of corpses, of wounded men, of dead horses, demolished guns and battered caissons and baggage-wagons. A whole brigade had been surprised at the moment, when, feeling certain that it had cleared the ground, it was about to march to the attack.

But a shout came from the top of the church, the front and nave of which had fallen in and presented an appearance of indescribable chaos. Only the tower, perforated by gun-fire and blackened by the smoke from some burning joists, still remained standing, bearing by some miracle of equilibrium, the slender stone spire with which it was crowned. With his body leaning out of this spire was a peasant, waving his arms and shouting to attract attention.

The officers recognized Paul Delroze.

Picking their way through the rubbish, our men climbed the staircase that led to the platform of the tower. Here, heaped up against the little door admitting to the spire, were the bodies of eight Germans; and the door, which was demolished and had dropped crosswise, barred the entrance in such a way that it had to be chopped to pieces before Paul could be released.

Toward the end of the afternoon, when it was manifest that the obstacles to the pursuit of the enemy were too serious to be overcome, the colonel embraced Corporal Delroze in front of the regiment mustered in the square.

"Let's speak of your reward first," he said. "I shall recommend you for the military medal; and you will be sure to get it. And now, my lad, tell your story."

And Paul stood answering questions in the middle of the circle formed around him by the officers and the non-commissioned officers of each company.

"Why, it's very simple, sir," he said. "We were being spied upon."

"Obviously; but who was the spy and where was he?"

"I learnt that by accident. Beside the position which we occupied this morning, there was a village, was there not, with a church?"

"Yes, but I had the village evacuated when I arrived; and there was no one in the church."

"If there was no one in the church, sir, why did the weather-vane point the wind coming from the east, when it was blowing from the west? And why, when we changed our position, was the vane pointed in our direction?"

"Are you sure of that?"

"Yes, sir. And that was why, after obtaining your leave, I did not hesitate to slip into the church and to enter the steeple as stealthily as I could. I was not mistaken. There was a man there whom I managed to overmaster, not without difficulty."

"The scoundrel! A Frenchman?"

"No, sir, a German dressed up as a peasant."

"He shall be shot."

"No, sir, please. I promised him his life."

"Never!"

"Well, you see, sir, I had to find out how he was keeping the enemy informed."

"Well?"

"Oh, it was simple enough! The church has a clock, facing the north, of which we could not see the dial, where we were. From the inside, our friend worked the hands so that the big hand, resting by turns on three or four figures, announced the exact distance at which we were from the church, in the direction pointed by the vane. This is what I next did myself; and the enemy at once, redirecting his fire by my indications, began conscientiously to shell the beet-field."

"He did," said the colonel, laughing.

"All that remained for me to do was to move on to the other observation-post, where the spy's messages were received. There I would learn the essential details which the spy himself did not know; I mean, where the enemy's batteries were hidden. I therefore ran to this place; and it was only on arriving here that I saw those batteries and a whole German brigade posted at the very foot of the church which did the duty of signaling-station."

"But that was a mad piece of recklessness! Didn't they fire on you?"

"I had put on the spy's clothes, sir, their spy's. I can speak German, I knew the pass-word and only one of them knew the spy and that was the officer on observation-duty. Without the least suspicion, the general commanding the brigade sent me to him as soon as I told him that the French had discovered me and that I had managed to escape them."

"And you had the cheek . . . ?"

"I had to, sir; and besides I held all the trump cards. The officer suspected nothing; and, when I reached the platform from which he was sending his signals, I had no difficulty in attacking him and reducing him to silence. My business was done and I had only to give you the signals agreed upon."

"Only that! In the midst of six or seven thousand men!"

"I had promised you, sir, and it was eleven o'clock. The platform had on it all the apparatus required for sending day or night signals. Why shouldn't I use it? I lit a rocket, followed by a second and a third and then a fourth; and the battle commenced."

"But those rockets were indications to draw our fire upon the very steeple where you were! It was you we were firing on!"

"Oh, I assure you, sir, one doesn't think of those things at such moments! I welcomed the first shell that struck the church. And then the enemy left me hardly any time for reflection. Half-a-dozen fellows at once came climbing the tower. I accounted for some of them with my revolver; but a second assault came and, later on, still another. I had to take refuge behind the door that closes the spire. When they had broken it down, it served me as a barricade; and, as I had the arms and ammunition which I had taken from my first assailants and was inaccessible and very nearly invisible, I found it easy to sustain a regular siege."

"While our seventy-fives were blazing away at you."

"While our seventy-fives were releasing me, sir; for you can understand that, once the church was destroyed and the nave in flames, no one dared to venture up the tower. I had nothing to do, therefore, but wait patiently for your arrival."

Paul Delroze had told his story in the simplest way and as though it concerned perfectly natural things. The colonel, after congratulating him again, confirmed his promotion to the rank of sergeant and said:

"Have you nothing to ask me?"

"Yes, sir, I should like to put a few more questions to the German spy whom I left behind me and, at the same time, to get back my uniform, which I hid."

"Very well, you shall dine here and we'll give you a bicycle afterwards."

Paul was back at the first church by seven o'clock in the evening. A great disappointment awaited him. The spy had broken his bonds and fled.

All Paul's searching, in the church and village, was useless. Nevertheless, on one of the steps of the staircase, near the place where he had flung himself upon the spy, he picked up the dagger with which his adversary had tried to strike him. It was exactly similar to the dagger which he had picked up in the grass, three weeks before, outside the little gate in the Ornequin woods. It had the same three-cornered blade, the same brown horn handle and, on the handle, the same four letters: H, E, R, M.

The spy and the woman who bore so strange a resemblance to Hermine d'Andeville, his father's murderess, both made use of an identical weapon.

Next day, the division to which Paul's regiment belonged continued the offensive and entered Belgium after repulsing the enemy. But in the evening the general received orders to fall back.

The retreat began. Painful as it was to one and all, it was doubly so perhaps to those of our troops which had been victorious at the start. Paul and his comrades in the third company could not contain themselves for rage and disappointment. During the half a day which they spent in Belgium, they saw the ruins of a little town that had been destroyed by the Germans, the bodies of eighty women who had been shot, old men hung up by their feet, stacks of murdered children. And they had to retire before those monsters!

Some of the Belgian soldiers had attached themselves to the regiment; and, with faces that still bore traces of horror at the infernal visions which they had beheld, these men told of things beyond the conception of the most vivid imagination. And our fellows had to retire. They had to retire with hatred in their hearts and a mad desire for vengeance that made their hands close fiercely on their rifles.

And why retire? It was not a question of being defeated, because they were falling back in good order, making sudden halts and delivering violent counter-attacks upon the disconcerted enemy. But his numbers overpowered all resistance. The wave of barbarians reformed itself. The place of each thousand dead was taken by two thousand of the living. And our men retired.

One evening, Paul learnt one of the reasons for this retreat from a week-old newspaper; and he was painfully affected by the news. On the 20th of August, Corvigny had been taken by assault, after some hours of bombardment effected under the most inexplicable conditions, whereas the stronghold was believed to be capable of holding out for at least some days, which would have strengthened our operations against the left flank of the Germans.

So Corvigny had fallen; and the Château d'Ornequin, doubtless abandoned, as Paul himself hoped, by Jérôme and Rosalie, was now destroyed, pillaged and sacked with the methodical thoroughness which the Huns applied to their work of devastation. On this side, too, the furious horde were crowding precipitately.

Those were sinister days, at the end of August, the most tragic days perhaps that France has ever passed through. Paris was threatened, a dozen departments were invaded. Death's icy breath hung over our gallant nation.

It was on the morning of one of these days that Paul heard a cheerful voice calling to him from a group of young soldiers behind him:

"Paul, Paul! I've got my way at last! Isn't it a stroke of luck?"

Those young soldiers were lads who had enlisted voluntarily and been drafted into the regiment; and Paul at once recognized Élisabeth's brother, Bernard d'Andeville. He had no time to think of the attitude which he had best take up. His first impulse would have been to turn away; but Bernard had seized his two hands and was pressing them with an affectionate kindness which showed that the boy knew nothing as yet of the breach between Paul and his wife.

"Yes, it's myself, old chap," he declared gaily. "I may call you old chap, mayn't I? It's myself and it takes your breath away, what? You're thinking of a providential meeting, the sort of coincidence one never sees: two brothers-in-law dropping into the same regiment. Well, it's not that: it happened at my express request. I said to the authorities, 'I'm enlisting by way of a duty and pleasure combined,' or words to that effect. 'But, as a crack athlete and a prize-winner in every gymnastic and drill-club I ever joined, I want to be sent to the front straight away and into the same regiment as my brother-in-law, Corporal Paul Delroze.' And, as they couldn't do without my services, they packed me off here. . . . Well? You don't look particularly delighted . . . ?"

Paul was hardly listening. He said to himself:

"This is the son of Hermine d'Andeville. The boy who is now touching me is the son of the woman who killed . . ."

But Bernard's face expressed such candor and such open-hearted pleasure at seeing him that he said:

"Yes, I am. Only you're so young!"

"I? I'm quite ancient. Seventeen the day I enlisted."

"But what did your father say?"

"Dad gave me leave. But for that, of course, I shouldn't have given him leave."

"What do you mean?"

"Why, he's enlisted, too."

"At his age?"

"Nonsense, he's quite juvenile. Fifty the day he enlisted! They found him a job as interpreter with the British staff. All the family under arms, you see. . . . Oh, I was forgetting, I've a letter for you from Élisabeth!"

Paul started. He had deliberately refrained from asking after his wife. He now said, as he took the letter:

"So she gave you this . . . ?"

"No, she sent it to us from Ornequin."

"From Ornequin? How can she have done that? Élisabeth left Ornequin on the day of mobilization, in the evening. She was going to Chaumont, to her aunt's."

"Not at all. I went and said good-bye to our aunt: she hadn't heard from Élisabeth since the beginning of the war. Besides, look at the envelope: 'M. Paul Delroze, care of M. d'Andeville, Paris, etc.' And it's post-marked Ornequin and Corvigny."

Paul looked and stammered:

"Yes, you're right; and I can read the date on the post-mark: 18 August. The 18th of August . . . and Corvigny fell into the hands of the Germans two days later, on the 20th. So Élisabeth was still there."

"No, no," cried Bernard, "Élisabeth isn't a child! You surely don't think she would have waited for the Huns, so close to the frontier! She would have left the château at the first sound of firing. And that's what she's telling you, I expect. Why don't you read her letter, Paul?"

Paul, on his side, had no idea of what he was about to learn on reading the letter; and he opened the envelope with a shudder.

What Élisabeth wrote was:

"Paul,

"I cannot make up my mind to leave Ornequin. A duty keeps me here in which I shall not fail, the duty of clearing my mother's memory. Do understand me, Paul. My mother remains the purest of creatures in my eyes. The woman who nursed me in her arms, for whom my father retains all his love, must not be even suspected. But you yourself accuse her; and it is against you that I wish to defend her. To compel you to believe me, I shall find the proofs that are not necessary to convince me. And it seems to me that those proofs can only be found here. So I shall stay.

"Jérôme and Rosalie are also staying on, though the enemy is said to be approaching. They have brave hearts, both of them, and you have nothing to fear, as I shall not be alone.

Élisabeth Delroze."

Paul folded up the letter. He was very pale.

Bernard asked:

"She's gone, hasn't she?"

"No, she's there."

"But this is madness! What, with those beasts about! A lonely country-house! . . . But look here, Paul, she must surely know the terrible dangers that threaten her! . . . What can be keeping her there? Oh, it's too dreadful to think of. . . ."

Paul stood silent, with a drawn face and clenched fists. . . .

CHAPTER V
THE PEASANT-WOMAN AT CORVIGNY

Three weeks before, on hearing that war was declared, Paul had felt rising within him the immediate resolution to get killed at all costs. The tragedy of his life, the horror of his marriage with a woman whom he still loved in his heart, the certainty which he had acquired at the Château d'Ornequin: all this had affected him to such a degree that he came to look upon death as a boon. To him, war represented, from the first and without the least demur, death. However much he might admire the solemnly impressive and magnificently consoling events of those first few weeks—the perfect order of the mobilization, the enthusiasm of the soldiers, the wonderful unity that prevailed in France, the awakening of the souls of the nation—none of these great spectacles attracted his attention. Deep down within himself he had determined that he would perform acts of such kind that not even the most improbable hazard could succeed in saving him.

Thus he thought that he had found the desired occasion on the first day. To overmaster the spy whose presence he suspected in the church steeple and then to penetrate to the very heart of the enemy's lines, in order to signal the position, meant going to certain death. He went bravely. And, as he had a very clear sense of his mission, he fulfilled it with as much prudence as courage. He was ready to die, but to die after succeeding. And he found a strange unexpected joy in the act itself as well as in the success that attended it.

The discovery of the dagger employed by the spy made a great impression on him. What connection did it establish between this man and the one who had tried to stab him? What was the connection between these two and the Comtesse d'Andeville, who had died sixteen years ago? And how, by what invisible links, were they all three related to that same work of treachery and spying of which Paul had surprised so many instances?

But Élisabeth's letter, above all, came upon him as a very violent blow. She was over there, amidst the bullets and the shells, the hot fighting around the château, the madness and the fury of the victors, the burning, the shooting, the torturing and atrocities! She was there, she so young and beautiful, almost alone, with no one to defend her! And she was there because he, Paul, had not had the grit to go back to her and see her once more and take her away with him!

These thoughts produced in Paul fits of depression from which he would suddenly awaken to thrust himself in the path of some danger, pursuing his mad enterprises to the end, come what might, with a quiet courage and a fierce obstinacy that filled his comrades with both surprise and admiration. And from that time onward he seemed to be seeking not so much death as the unspeakable ecstasy which a man feels in defying it.

Then came the 6th of September, the day of the unheard-of miracle when our great general-in-chief, addressing his armies in words that will never perish, at last ordered them to fling themselves upon the enemy. The gallantly-borne but cruel retreat came to an end. Exhausted, breathless, fighting against odds for days, with no time for sleep, with no time to eat, marching only by force of prodigious efforts of which they were not even conscious, unable to say why they did not lie down in the road-side ditches to await death, such were the men who received the word of command:

"Halt! About face! And now have at the enemy!"

And they faced about. Those dying men recovered their strength. From the humblest to the most illustrious, each summoned up his will and fought as though the safety of France depended upon him alone. There were as many glorious heroes as there were soldiers. They were asked to conquer or die. They conquered.

Paul shone in the front rank of the fearless. He himself knew that what he did and what he endured, what he tried to do and what he succeeded in doing surpassed the limits of reality. On the 6th and the 7th and the 8th and again from the 11th to the 13th, despite his excessive fatigue, despite the deprivations of sleep and food which it seemed impossible for the human frame to resist, he had no other sensation than that of advancing and again advancing—and always advancing. Whether in sunshine or in shade, whether on the banks of the Marne or on the woody slopes of the Argonne, whether north or east, when his division was sent to reinforce the troops on the frontier, whether lying flat and creeping along in the plowed fields or on his feet and charging with the bayonet, he was always going forward and each step was a delivery and each step was a conquest.

Each step also increased the hatred in his heart. Oh, how right his father had been to loathe those people! Paul now saw them at work. On every side were stupid devastation and unreasoning destruction, on every side arson, pillage and death, hostages shot, women murdered, bestially, for the love of the thing. Churches, country-houses, mansions of the rich and cabins of the poor: nothing remained. The very ruins had been razed to the ground, the very corpses tortured.

O the delight of defeating such an enemy! Though reduced to half its full strength, Paul's regiment, released like a pack of hounds, never ceased biting at the wild beast which it was hunting. The quarry seemed more vicious and formidable the nearer it approached to the frontier; and our men kept rushing at it in the mad hope of giving it the death-stroke.

One day Paul read on a sign-post at a cross-roads:

Corvigny, 14 Kil.
Ornequin, 31 Kil. 400.
The Frontier, 33 Kil. 200.

Corvigny! Ornequin! A thrill passed through his frame when he saw those unexpected words. As a rule, absorbed as he was by the heat of the conflict and by his private cares, he paid little attention to the names of the places which he passed; and he learnt them only by chance. And now suddenly he was within so short a distance of the Château d'Ornequin! "Corvigny, 14 kilometers:" less than nine miles! . . . Were the French troops making for Corvigny, for the little fortified place which the Germans had taken by assault and taken under such strange conditions?

That day, they had been fighting since daylight against an enemy whose resistance seemed to grow slacker and slacker. Paul, at the head of a squad of men, was sent to the village of Bléville with orders to enter it if the enemy had retired, but go no farther. And it was just beyond the last houses of the village that he saw the sign-post.

At the time, he was not quite easy in his mind. A Taube had flown over the country a few minutes before. There was the possibility of an ambush.

"Let's go back to the village," he said. "We'll barricade ourselves while we wait."

But there was a sudden noise behind a wooded hill that interrupted the road in the Corvigny direction, a noise that became more and more definite, until Paul recognized the powerful throb of a motor, doubtless a motor carrying a quick-firing gun.

"Crouch down in the ditch," he cried to his men. "Hide yourselves in the haystacks. Fix bayonets. And don't move any of you!"

He had realized the danger of that motor's passing through the village, plunging in the midst of his company, scattering panic and then making off by some other way.

He quickly climbed the split trunk of an old oak and took up his position in the branches a few feet above the road.

The motor soon came in sight. It was, as he expected, an armored car, but one of the old pattern, which allowed the helmets and heads of the men to show above the steel plating.

It came along at a smart pace, ready to dart forward in case of alarm. The men were stooping with bent backs. Paul counted half-a-dozen of them. The barrels of two Maxim guns projected beyond the car.

He put his rifle to his shoulder and took aim at the driver, a fat Teuton with a scarlet face that seemed dyed with blood. Then, when the moment came, he calmly fired.

"Charge, lads!" he cried, as he scrambled down from his tree.

But it was not even necessary to take the car by storm. The driver, struck in the chest, had had the presence of mind to apply the brakes and pull up. Seeing themselves surrounded, the Germans threw up their hands:

"Kamerad! Kamerad!"

And one of them, flinging down his arms, leapt from the motor and came running up to Paul:

"An Alsatian, sergeant, an Alsatian from Strasburg! Ah, sergeant, many's the day that I've been waiting for this moment!"

While his men were taking the prisoners to the village, Paul hurriedly questioned the Alsatian:

"Where has the car come from?"

"Corvigny."

"Any of your people there?"

"Very few. A rearguard of two hundred and fifty Badeners at the most."

"And in the forts?"

"About the same number. They didn't think it necessary to mend the turrets and now they've been taken unprepared. They're hesitating whether to try and make a stand or to fall back on the frontier; and that's why we were sent to reconnoiter."

"So we can go ahead?"

"Yes, but at once, else they will receive powerful reinforcements, two divisions."

"When?"

"To-morrow. They're to cross the frontier, to-morrow, about the middle of the day."

"By Jove! There's no time to be lost!" said Paul.

While examining the guns and having the prisoners disarmed and searched, Paul was considering the best measures to take, when one of his men, who had stayed behind in the village, came and told him of the arrival of a French detachment, with a lieutenant in command.

Paul hastened to tell the officer what had happened. Events called for immediate action. He offered to go on a scouting expedition in the captured motor.

"Very well," said the officer. "I'll occupy the village and arrange to have the division informed as soon as possible."

The car made off in the direction of Corvigny, with eight men packed inside. Two of them, placed in charge of the quick-firing guns, studied the mechanism. The Alsatian stood up, so as to show his helmet and uniform clearly, and scanned the horizon on every side.

All this was decided upon and done in the space of a few minutes, without discussion and without delaying over the details of the undertaking.

"We must trust to luck," said Paul, taking his seat at the wheel. "Are you ready to see the job through, boys?"

"Yes; and further," said a voice which he recognized, just behind him.

It was Bernard d'Andeville, Élisabeth's brother. Bernard belonged to the 9th company; and Paul had succeeded in avoiding him, since their first meeting, or at least in not speaking to him. But he knew that the youngster was fighting well.

"Ah, so you're there?" he said.

"In the flesh," said Bernard. "I came along with my lieutenant; and, when I saw you getting into the motor and taking any one who turned up, you can imagine how I jumped at the chance!" And he added, in a more embarrassed tone, "The chance of doing a good stroke of work, under your orders, and the chance of talking to you, Paul . . . for I've been unlucky so far. . . . I even thought that . . . that you were not as well-disposed to me as I hoped. . . ."

"Nonsense," said Paul. "Only I was bothered. . . ."

"You mean, about Élisabeth?"

"Yes."

"I see. All the same, that doesn't explain why there was something between us, a sort of constraint . . ."

At that moment, the Alsatian exclaimed:

"Lie low there! . . . Uhlans ahead! . . ."

A patrol came trotting down a cross-road, turning the corner of a wood. He shouted to them, as the car passed:

"Clear out, Kameraden! Fast as you can! The French are coming!"

Paul took advantage of the incident not to answer his brother-in-law. He had forced the pace; and the motor was now thundering along, scaling the hills and shooting down them like a meteor.

The enemy detachments became more numerous. The Alsatian called out to them or else by means of signs incited them to beat an immediate retreat.

"It's the funniest thing to see," he said, laughing. "They're all galloping behind us like mad." And he added, "I warn you, sergeant, that at this rate we shall dash right into Corvigny. Is that what you want to do?"

"No," replied Paul, "we'll stop when the town's in sight."

"And, if we're surrounded?"

"By whom? In any case, these bands of fugitives won't be able to oppose our return."

Bernard d'Andeville spoke:

"Paul," he said, "I don't believe you're thinking of returning."

"You're quite right. Are you afraid?"

"Oh, what an ugly word!"

But presently Paul went on, in a gentler voice:

"I'm sorry you came, Bernard."

"Is the danger greater for me than for you and the others?"

"No."

"Then do me the honor not to be sorry."

Still standing up and leaning over the sergeant, the Alsatian pointed with his hand:

"That spire straight ahead, behind the trees, is Corvigny. I calculate that, by slanting up the hills on the left, we ought to be able to see what's happening in the town."

"We shall see much better by going inside," Paul remarked. "Only it's a big risk . . . especially for you, Alsatian. If they take you prisoner, they'll shoot you. Shall I put you down this side of Corvigny?"

"You haven't studied my face, sergeant."

The road was now running parallel with the railway. Soon, the first houses of the outskirts came in sight. A few soldiers appeared.

"Not a word to these," Paul ordered. "It won't do to startle them . . . or they'll take us from behind at the critical moment."

He recognized the station and saw that it was strongly held. Spiked helmets were coming and going along the avenues that led to the town.

"Forward!" cried Paul. "If there's any large body of troops, it can only be in the square. Are the guns ready? And the rifles? See to mine for me, Bernard. And, at the first signal, independent fire!"

The motor rushed at full speed into the square. As he expected, there were about a hundred men there, all massed in front of the church-steps, near their stacked rifles. The church was a mere heap of ruins; and almost all the houses in the square had been leveled to the ground by the bombardment.

The officers, standing on one side, cheered and waved their hands on seeing the motor which they had sent out to reconnoiter and whose return they seemed to be expecting before making their decision about the defense of the town. There were a good many of them, their number no doubt including some communication officers. A general stood a head and shoulders above the rest. A number of cars were waiting some little distance away.

The street was paved with cobble-stones and there was no raised pavement between it and the square. Paul followed it; but, when he was within twenty yards of the officers, he gave a violent turn of the wheel and the terrible machine made straight for the group, knocking them down and running over them, slanted off slightly, so as to take the stacks of rifles, and then plunged like an irresistible mass right into the middle of the detachment, spreading death as it went, amid a mad, hustling flight and yells of pain and terror.

"Independent fire!" cried Paul, stopping the car.

And the firing began from this impregnable blockhouse, which had suddenly sprung up in the center of the square, accompanied by the sinister crackle of the two Maxim guns.

In five minutes, the square was strewn with killed and wounded men. The general and several officers lay dead. The survivors took to their heels.

Paul gave the order to cease fire and took the car to the top of the avenue that led to the station. The troops from the station were hastening up, attracted by the shooting. A few volleys from the guns dispersed them.

Paul drove three times quickly round the square, to examine the approaches. On every side the enemy was fleeing along the roads and paths to the frontier. And on every hand the inhabitants of Corvigny came out of their houses and gave vent to their delight.

"Pick up and see to the wounded," Paul ordered. "And send for the bell-ringer, or some one who understands about the bells. It's urgent!"

An aged sacristan appeared.

"The tocsin, old man, the tocsin for all you're worth! And, when you're tired, have some one to take your place! The tocsin, without stopping for a second!"

This was the signal which Paul had agreed upon with the French lieutenant, to announce to the division that the enterprise had succeeded and that the troops were to advance.

It was two o'clock. At five, the staff and a brigade had taken possession of Corvigny and our seventy-fives were firing a few shells. By ten o'clock in the evening, the rest of the division having come up meantime, the Germans had been driven out of the Grand Jonas and the Petit Jonas and were concentrating before the frontier. It was decided to dislodge them at daybreak.

"Paul," said Bernard to his brother-in-law, at the evening roll-call, "I have something to tell you, something that puzzles me, a very queer thing: you'll judge for yourself. Just now, I was walking down one of the streets near the church when a woman spoke to me. I couldn't make out her face or her dress at first, because it was almost dark, but she seemed to be a peasant-woman from the sound of her wooden shoes on the cobbles. 'Young man,' she said—and her way of expressing herself surprised me a little in a peasant-woman—'Young man, you may be able to tell me something I want to know.' I said I was at her service and she began, 'It's like this: I live in a little village close by. I heard just now that your army corps was here. So I came, because I wanted to see a soldier who belonged to it, only I don't know the number of his regiment. I believe he has been transferred, because I never get a letter from him; and I dare say he has not had mine. Oh, if you only happened to know him! He's such a good lad, such a gallant fellow.' I asked her to tell me his name; and she answered, 'Delroze, Corporal Paul Delroze.'"

"What!" cried Paul. "Did she want me?"

"Yes, Paul, and the coincidence struck me as so curious that I just gave her the number of your regiment and your company, without telling her that we were related. 'Good,' she said. 'And is the regiment at Corvigny?' I said it had just arrived. 'And do you know Paul Delroze?' 'Only by name,' I answered. I can't tell you why I answered like that, or why I continued the conversation so as not to let her guess my surprise: 'He has been promoted to sergeant,' I said, 'and mentioned in dispatches. That's how I come to have heard his name. Shall I find out where he is and take you to him?' 'Not yet,' she said, 'not yet. I should be too much upset.'"

"What on earth did she mean?"

"I can't imagine. It struck me as more and more suspicious. Here was a woman looking for you eagerly and yet putting off the chance of seeing you. I asked her if she was very much interested in you and she said yes, that you were her son."

"Her son!"

"Up to then I am certain that she did not suspect for a second that I was cross-examining her. But my astonishment was so great that she drew back into the shadow, as though to put herself on the defensive. I slipped my hand into my pocket, pulled out my little electric lamp, went up to her, pressed the spring and flung the light full in her face. She seemed disconcerted and stood for a moment without moving. Then she quickly lowered a scarf which she wore over her head and, with a strength which I should never have believed, struck me on the arm and made me drop my lamp. Then came a second of absolute silence. I couldn't make out where she was: whether in front of me, or on the right or the left. There was no sound to tell me if she was there still or not. But I understood presently, when, after picking up my lamp and switching on the light again, I saw her two wooden shoes on the ground. She had stepped out of them and run away on her stocking-feet. I hunted for her, but couldn't find her. She had disappeared."

Paul had listened to his brother-in-law's story with increasing attention.

"Then you saw her face?" he asked.

"Oh, quite distinctly! A strong face, with black hair and eyebrows and a look of great wickedness. . . . Her clothes were those of a peasant-woman, but too clean and too carefully put on: I felt somehow that they were a disguise."

"About what age was she?"

"Forty."

"Would you know her again?"

"Without a moment's hesitation."

"What was the color of the scarf you mentioned?"

"Black."

"How was it fastened? In a knot?"

"No, with a brooch."

"A cameo?"

"Yes, a large cameo set in gold. How did you know that?"

Paul was silent for some time and then said:

"I will show you to-morrow, in one of the rooms at Ornequin, a portrait which should bear a striking resemblance to the woman who spoke to you, the sort of resemblance that exists between two sisters perhaps . . . or . . . or . . ." He took his brother-in-law by the arm and, leading him along, continued, "Listen to me, Bernard. There are terrible things around us, in the present and the past, things that affect my life and Élisabeth's . . . and yours as well. Therefore, I am struggling in the midst of a hideous obscurity in which enemies whom I do not know have for twenty years been pursuing a scheme which I am quite unable to understand. In the beginning of the struggle, my father died, the victim of a murder. To-day it is I that am being threatened. My marriage with your sister is shattered and nothing can bring us together again, just as nothing will ever again allow you and me to be on those terms of friendship and confidence which we had the right to hope for. Don't ask me any questions, Bernard, and don't try to find out any more. One day, perhaps—and I do not wish that day ever to arrive—you will know why I begged for your silence."

CHAPTER VI
WHAT PAUL SAW AT ORNEQUIN

Paul Delroze was awakened at dawn by the bugle-call. And, in the artillery duel that now began, he at once recognized the sharp, dry voice of the seventy-fives and the hoarse bark of the German seventy-sevens.

"Are you coming, Paul?" Bernard called from his room. "Coffee is served downstairs."

The brothers-in-law had found two little bedrooms over a publican's shop. While they both did credit to a substantial breakfast, Paul told Bernard the particulars of the occupation of Corvigny and Ornequin which he had gathered on the evening before:

"On Wednesday, the nineteenth of August, Corvigny, to the great satisfaction of the inhabitants, still thought that it would be spared the horrors of war. There was fighting in Alsace and outside Nancy, there was fighting in Belgium; but it looked as if the German thrust were neglecting the route of invasion offered by the valley of the Liseron. The fact is that this road is a narrow one and apparently of secondary importance. At Corvigny, a French brigade was busily pushing forward the defense-works. The Grand Jonas and the Petit Jonas were ready under their concrete cupolas. Our fellows were waiting."

"And at Ornequin?" asked Bernard.

"At Ornequin, we had a company of light infantry. The officers put up at the house. This company, supported by a detachment of dragoons, patrolled the frontier day and night. In case of alarm, the orders were to inform the forts at once and to retreat fighting. The evening of Wednesday was absolutely quiet. A dozen dragoons had galloped over the frontier till they were in sight of the little German town of Èbrecourt. There was not a movement of troops to be seen on that side, nor on the railway-line that ends at Èbrecourt. The night also was peaceful. Not a shot was fired. It is fully proved that at two o'clock in the morning not a single German soldier had crossed the frontier. Well, at two o'clock exactly, a violent explosion was heard, followed by four others at close intervals. These explosions were due to the bursting of five four-twenty shells which demolished straightway the three cupolas of the Grand Jonas and the two cupolas of the Petit Jonas."

"What do you mean? Corvigny is fifteen miles from the frontier; and the four-twenties don't carry as far as that!"

"That didn't prevent six more shells falling at Corvigny, all on the church or in the square. And these six shells fell twenty minutes later, that is to say, at the time when it was to be presumed that the alarm would have been given and that the Corvigny garrison would have assembled in the square. This was just what had happened; and you can imagine the carnage that resulted."

"I agree; but, once more, the frontier was fifteen miles away. That distance must have given our troops time to form up again and to prepare for the attacks foretold by the bombardment. They had at least three or four hours before them."

"They hadn't fifteen minutes. The bombardment was not over before the assault began. Assault isn't the word: our troops, those at Corvigny as well as those which hastened up from the two forts, were decimated and routed, surrounded by the enemy, shot down or obliged to surrender, before it was possible to organize any sort of resistance. It all happened suddenly under the blinding glare of flash-lights erected no one knew where or how. And the catastrophe was immediate. You may take it that Corvigny was invested, attacked, captured and occupied by the enemy, all in ten minutes."

"But where did he come from? Where did he spring from?"

"Nobody knows."

"But the night-patrols on the frontier? The sentries? The company on duty at Ornequin?"

"Never heard of again. No one knows anything, not a word, not a rumor, about those three hundred men whose business it was to keep watch and to warn the others. You can reckon up the Corvigny garrison, with the soldiers who escaped and the dead whom the inhabitants identified and buried. But the three hundred light infantry of Ornequin disappeared without leaving the shadow of a trace behind them, not a fugitive, not a wounded man, not a corpse, nothing at all."

"It seems incredible. Whom did you talk to?"

"I saw ten people last night who, for a month, with no one to interfere with them except a few soldiers of the Landsturm placed in charge of Corvigny, have pursued a minute inquiry into all these problems, without establishing so much as a plausible theory. One thing alone is certain: the business was prepared long ago, down to the slightest detail. The exact range had been taken of the forts, the cupolas, the church and the square; and the siege-gun had been placed in position before and accurately laid so that the eleven shells should strike the eleven objects aimed at. That's all. The rest is mystery."

"And what about the château? And Élisabeth?"

Paul had risen from his seat. The bugles were sounding the morning roll-call. The gun-fire was twice as intense as before. They both started for the square; and Paul continued:

"Here, too, the mystery is bewildering and perhaps worse. One of the cross-roads that run through the fields between Corvigny and Ornequin has been made a boundary by the enemy which no one here had the right to overstep under pain of death."

"Then Élisabeth . . . ?"

"I don't know, I know nothing more. And it's terrible, this shadow of death lying over everything, over every incident. It appears—I have not been able to find out where the rumor originated—that the village of Ornequin, near the château, no longer exists. It has been entirely destroyed, more than that, annihilated; and its four hundred inhabitants have been sent away into captivity. And then . . ." Paul shuddered and, lowering his voice, went on, "And then . . . what did they do at the château? You can see the house, you can still see it at a distance, with its walls and turrets standing. But what happened behind those walls? What has become of Élisabeth? For nearly four weeks she has been living in the midst of those brutes, poor thing, exposed to every outrage! . . ."

The sun had hardly risen when they reached the square. Paul was sent for by his colonel, who gave him the heartiest congratulations of the general commanding the division and told him that his name had been submitted for the military cross and for a commission as second lieutenant and that he was to take command of his section from now.

"That's all," said the colonel, laughing. "Unless you have any further request to make."

"I have two, sir."

"Go ahead."

"First, that my brother-in-law here, Bernard d'Andeville, may be at once transferred to my section as corporal. He's deserved it."

"Very well. And next?"

"My second request is that presently, when we move towards the frontier, my section may be sent to the Château d'Ornequin, which is on the direct route."

"You mean that it is to take part in the attack on the château?"

"The attack?" echoed Paul, in alarm. "Why, the enemy is concentrated along the frontier, four miles from the château!"

"So it was believed, yesterday. In reality, the concentration took place at the Château d'Ornequin, an excellent defensive position where the enemy is hanging desperately while waiting for his reinforcements to come up. The best proof is that he's answering our fire. Look at that shell bursting over there . . . and, farther off, that shrapnel . . . two . . . three of them. Those are the guns which located the batteries which we have set up on the surrounding hills and which are now peppering them like mad. They must have twenty guns there."

"Then, in that case," stammered Paul, tortured by a horrible thought, "in that case, that fire of our batteries is directed at . . ."

"At them, of course. Our seventy-fives have been bombarding the Château d'Ornequin for the last hour."

Paul uttered an exclamation of horror:

"Do you mean to say, sir, that we're bombarding Ornequin? . . ."

And Bernard d'Andeville, standing beside him, repeated, in an anguish-stricken voice:

"Bombarding Ornequin? Oh, how awful!"

The colonel asked, in surprise:

"Do you know the place? Perhaps it belongs to you? Is that so? And are any of your people there?"

"Yes, sir, my wife."

Paul was very pale. Though he made an effort to stand stock-still, in order to master his emotion, his hands trembled a little and his chin quivered.

On the Grand Jonas, three pieces of heavy artillery began thundering, three Rimailho guns, which had been hoisted into position by traction engines. And this, added to the stubborn work of the seventy-fives, assumed a terrible significance after Paul Delroze's words. The colonel and the group of officers around him kept silence. The situation was one of those in which the fatalities of war run riot in all their tragic horror, stronger than the forces of nature themselves and, like them, blind, unjust and implacable. There was nothing to be done. Not one of those men would have dreamt of asking for the gun-fire to cease or to slacken its activity. And Paul did not dream of it, either. He merely said:

"It looks as if the enemy's fire was slowing down. Perhaps they are retreating. . . ."

Three shells bursting at the far end of the town, behind the church, belied this hope. The colonel shook his head:

"Retreating? Not yet. The place is too important to them; they are waiting for reinforcements and they won't give way until our regiments take part in the game . . . which won't be long now."

In fact, the order to advance was brought to the colonel a few moments later. The regiment was to follow the road and deploy in the meadows on the right.

"Come along, gentlemen," he said to his officers. "Sergeant Delroze's section will march in front. His objective will be the Château d'Ornequin. There are two little short cuts. Take both of them."

"Very well, sir."

All Paul's sorrow and rage were intensified in a boundless need for action; when he marched off with his men, he felt an inexhaustible strength, felt capable of conquering the enemy's position all by himself. He moved from one to the other with the untiring hurry of a sheep-dog hustling his flock. He never ceased advising and encouraging his men:

"You're one of the plucky ones, old chap, I know, you're no shirker. . . . Nor you either . . . Only you think too much about your skin, you keep grumbling, when you ought to be cheerful. . . . Who's downhearted, eh? There's a bit more collar-work to do and we're going to do it without looking behind us, what?"

Overhead, the shells followed their march in the air, whistling and moaning and exploding till they formed a sort of canopy of steel and grape-shot.

"Duck your heads! Lie down flat!" cried Paul.

He himself remained standing, indifferent to the flight of the enemy's shells. But with what terror he listened to our own, those coming from behind, from all the hills hard by, whizzing ahead of them to carry destruction and death. Where would this one fall? And that one, where would its murderous rain of bullets and splinters descend?

He was obsessed with the vision of his wife, wounded, dying, and kept on murmuring her name. For many days now, ever since the day when he learnt that Élisabeth had refused to leave the Château d'Ornequin, he could not think of her without a loving emotion that was never spoilt by any impulse of revolt, any movement of anger. He no longer mingled the detestable memories of the past with the charming reality of his love. When he thought of the hated mother, the image of the daughter no longer appeared before his mind. They were two creatures of a different race, having no connection one with the other. Élisabeth, full of courage, risking her life to obey a duty to which she attached a value greater than her life, acquired in Paul's eyes a singular dignity. She was indeed the woman whom he had loved and cherished, the woman whom he loved still.

Paul stopped. He had ventured with his men into an open piece of ground, probably marked down in advance, which the enemy was now peppering with shrapnel. A number of men were hit.

"Halt!" he cried. "Flat on your stomachs, all of you!"

He caught hold of Bernard:

"Lie down, kid, can't you? Why expose yourself unnecessarily? . . . Stay there. Don't move."

He held him to the ground with a friendly pressure, keeping his arm round Bernard's neck and speaking to him with gentleness, as though he were trying to display to the brother all the affection that rose to his heart for his dear Élisabeth. He forgot the harsh words which he had addressed to Bernard and uttered quite different words, throbbing with a fondness which he had denied the evening before:

"Don't move, youngster. You see, I had no business to bring you with me or to drag you into this hot place. I'm responsible for you and I'm not going to have you hurt."

The fire diminished in intensity. By crawling over the ground, the men reached a double row of poplars which led them, by a gentle ascent, towards a ridge intersected by a hollow road. Paul, on climbing the slope which overlooked the Ornequin plateau, saw the ruins of the village in the distance, with its shattered church, and, farther to the left, a wilderness of trees and stones whence rose the walls of a building. This was the château. On every side around were blazing farmhouses, haystacks and barns.

Behind the section, the French troops were scattering forward in all directions. A battery had taken up its position in the shelter of a wood close by and was firing incessantly. Paul could see the shells bursting over the château and among the ruins.

Unable to bear the sight any longer, he resumed his march at the head of his section. The enemy's guns had ceased thundering, had doubtless been reduced to silence. But, when they were well within two miles of Ornequin, the bullets whistled around them and Paul saw a detachment of Germans falling back upon the village, firing as they went. And the seventy-fives and Rimailhos kept on growling. The din was terrible.

Paul gripped Bernard by the arm and, in a quivering voice, said:

"If anything happens to me, tell Élisabeth that I beg her to forgive me. Do you understand? I beg her to forgive me."

He was suddenly afraid that fate would not allow him to see his wife again; and he realized that he had behaved to her with unpardonable cruelty, deserting her as though she were guilty of a fault which she had not committed and abandoning her to every form of distress and torment. And he walked on briskly, followed at a distance by his men.

But, at the spot where the short cut joins the high road, in sight of the Liseron, a cyclist rode up to him. The colonel had ordered that the section should wait for the main body of the regiment in order to make an attack in full force.

This was the cruelest test of all. Paul, a victim to ever-increasing excitement, trembled with fever and rage.

"Come, Paul," said Bernard, "don't work yourself into such a state! We shall get there in time."

"In time for what?" he retorted. "To find her dead or wounded? Or not to find her at all? Oh, hang it, why can't our guns stop their damned row? What are they shelling, now that the enemy's no longer replying? Dead bodies and demolished houses! . . ."

"What about the rearguard covering the German retreat?"

"Well, aren't we here, the infantry? This is our job. All we have to do is to send out our sharpshooters and follow up with a good bayonet-charge. . . ."

At last the section set out again, reinforced by the remainder of the ninth company and under the command of the captain. A detachment of hussars galloped by, pricking towards the village to cut off the fugitives. The company swerved towards the château.

Opposite them, all was silent as the grave. Was it a trap? Was there not every reason to believe that enemy forces, strongly entrenched and barricaded as these were, would prepare to offer a last resistance? And yet there was nothing suspicious in the avenue of old oaks that led to the front court, not a sign of life to be seen or heard.

Paul and Bernard, still keeping ahead, with their fingers on the trigger of their rifles, searched the dim light of the underwood with a keen glance. Columns of smoke rose above the wall, which was now quite near, yawning with breach upon breach. As they approached, they heard moans, followed by the heart-rending sound of a death-rattle. It was the German wounded.

And suddenly the earth shook as though an inner upheaval had shattered its crust and from the other side of the wall came a tremendous explosion, or rather a series of explosions, like so many peals of thunder. The air was darkened with a cloud of sand and dust which sent forth all sorts of stones and rubbish. The enemy had blown up the château.

"That was meant for us, I expect," said Bernard. "We were to have been blown up at the same time. They were out in their calculations."

When they had passed the gate, the sight of the mined court-yard, of the shattered turrets, of the demolished château, of the out-houses in flames, of the dying in their last throes and the thickly stacked corpses of the dead startled them into recoiling.

"Forward! Forward!" shouted the colonel, galloping up. "There are troops that must have made off across the park."

Paul knew the road, which he had covered a few weeks earlier in such tragic circumstances. He rushed across the lawns, among blocks of stone and uprooted trees. But, as he passed in sight of a little lodge that stood at the entrance to the wood, he stopped, nailed to the ground. And Bernard and all the men stood stupefied, opening their mouths wide with horror.

Against the lodge, two corpses rested on their feet, fastened to rings in the wall by a single chain wound round their waists. Their bodies were bent over the chains and their arms hung to the ground.

They were the corpses of a man and a woman. Paul recognized Jérôme and Rosalie. They had been shot.

The chain continued beyond them. There was a third ring in the wall. The plaster was stained with blood and there were visible traces of bullets. There had been a third victim, without a doubt, and the body had been removed.

As he approached, Paul noticed a splinter of bomb-shell embedded in the plaster. Around the hole thus formed, between the plaster and the splinter, was a handful of fair hair with golden lights in it, hair torn from the head of Élisabeth.

CHAPTER VII
H. E. R. M.

Paul's first feeling was an immense need of revenge, then and there, at all costs, a need outweighing any sense of horror or despair. He gazed around him, as though all the wounded men who lay dying in the park were guilty of the monstrous crime:

"The cowards!" he snarled. "The murderers!"

"Are you sure," stammered Bernard, "are you sure it's Élisabeth's hair?"

"Why, of course I am. They've shot her as they shot the two others. I know them both: it's the keeper and his wife. Oh, the blackguards! . . ."

He raised the butt of his rifle over a German dragging himself in the grass and was about to strike him, when the Colonel came up to him:

"Hullo, Delroze, what are you doing? Where's your company?"

"Oh, sir, if you only knew! . . ."

He rushed up to his colonel. He looked like a madman and brandished his rifle as he spoke:

"They've killed her, sir, yes, they've shot my wife. . . . Look, against the wall there, with the two people who were in her service. . . . They've shot her. . . . She was twenty years old, sir. . . . Oh, we must kill them all like dogs!"

But Bernard was dragging him away:

"Don't let us waste time, Paul; we can take our revenge on those who are still fighting. . . . I hear firing over there. Some of them are surrounded, I expect."

Paul hardly knew what he was doing. He started running again, drunk with rage and grief.

Ten minutes later, he had rejoined his company and was crossing the open space where his father had been stabbed. The chapel was in front of him. Farther on, instead of the little door that used to be in the wall, a great breach had been made, to admit the convoys of wagons for provisioning the castle. Eight hundred yards beyond it, a violent rifle-fire crackled over the fields, at the crossing of the road and the highway.

A few dozen retreating Germans were trying to force their way through the hussars who had come by the high road. They were attacked from behind by Paul's company, but succeeded in taking shelter in a square patch of trees and copsewood, where they defended themselves with fierce energy, retiring step by step and dropping one after the other.

"Why don't they surrender?" muttered Paul, who was firing continually and who was gradually being calmed by the heat of the fray. "You would think they were trying to gain time."

"Look over there!" said Bernard, in a husky voice.

Under the trees, a motor-car had just come from the frontier, crammed with German soldiers. Was it bringing reinforcements? No, the motor turned almost in its own length; and between it and the last of the combatants stood an officer in a long gray cloak, who, revolver in hand, exhorted them to persevere in their resistance, while he himself effected his retreat towards the car sent to his rescue.

"Look, Paul," Bernard repeated, "look!"

Paul was dumfounded. That officer to whom Bernard was calling his attention was . . . but no, it could not be. And yet . . .

"What do you mean to suggest, Bernard?" he asked.

"It's the same face," muttered Bernard, "the same face as yesterday, you know, Paul: the face of the woman who asked me those questions about you, Paul."

And Paul on his side recognized beyond the possibility of a doubt the mysterious individual who had tried to kill him at the little door leading out of the park, the creature who presented such an unconceivable resemblance to his father's murderess, to the woman of the portrait, to Hermine d'Andeville, Élisabeth's mother and Bernard's.

Bernard raised his rifle to fire.

"No, don't do that!" cried Paul, terrified at the movement.

"Why not?"

"Let's try and take him alive."

He darted forward in a mad rush of hatred, but the officer had run to the car. The German soldiers held out their hands and hoisted him into their midst. Paul shot the one who was seated at the wheel. The officer caught hold of it just as the car was about to strike a tree, changed the direction and, skilfully guiding the car past the intervening obstacles, drove it behind a bend in the ground and from there towards the frontier. He was saved.

As soon as he was beyond the range of the bullets, the German soldiers who were still fighting surrendered.

Paul was trembling with impotent fury. To him this individual represented every imaginable form of evil; and, from the first to the last minute of that long series of tragedies, murders, attempts at spying and assassination, treacheries and deliberate shootings, all conceived with the same object and the same spirit, that one figure stood out as the very genius of crime.

Nothing short of the creature's death would have appeased Paul's hatred. It was he, the monster, Paul never entertained a doubt of it, who had ordered Élisabeth to be shot. Élisabeth shot! Oh, the shame of it! Oh, infernal vision that tormented him! . . .

"Who is he?" he cried. "How can we find out? How can we get at him and torture him and kill him?"

"Question a prisoner," said Bernard.

The captain considered it wiser to advance no farther and ordered the company to fall back, so as to remain in touch with the remainder of the regiment. Paul was told off specially to occupy the château with his section and to take the prisoners there.

He lost no time in questioning two or three non-commissioned officers and some of the soldiers, as they went. But he could obtain nothing but a mass of conflicting particulars from them, for they had arrived from Corvigny the day before and had only spent the night at the château. They did not even know the name of the officer in the flowing gray cloak for whom so many of them had sacrificed their lives. He was called the major; and that was all.

"But still," Paul insisted, "he was your actual commanding officer?"

"No. The leader of the rearguard detachment to which we belong is an Oberleutnant who was wounded by the exploding of the mines, when we ran away. We wanted to take him with us, but the major objected, leveling his revolver at us, telling us to march in front of him and threatening to shoot the first man who left him in the lurch. And just now, while we were fighting, he stood ten paces behind us and kept threatening us with his revolver to compel us to defend him. He shot three of us, as a matter of fact."

"He was reckoning on the assistance of the car, wasn't he?"

"Yes; and also on reinforcements which were to save us all, so he said. But only the car came; and it just saved him."

"The Oberleutnant would know his name, of course. Is he badly wounded?"

"He's got a broken leg. We made him comfortable in a lodge in the park."

"The lodge against which your people put to death . . . those civilians?"

"Yes."

They were nearing the lodge, a sort of little orangery into which the plants were taken in winter. Rosalie and Jérôme's bodies had been removed. But the sinister chain was still hanging on the wall, fastened to the three iron rings; and Paul once more beheld, with a shudder of dread, the marks left by the bullet and the little splinter of bomb-shell that kept Élisabeth's hair embedded in the plaster.

A French bomb-shell! An added horror to the atrocity of the murder!

It was therefore Paul who, on the day before, by capturing the armored motor-car and effecting his daring raid on Corvigny, thus opening the road to the French troops, had brought about the events that ended in his wife's being murdered! The enemy had revenged himself for his retreat by shooting the inhabitants of the château! Élisabeth fastened to the wall by a chain had been riddled with bullets. And, by a hideous irony, her corpse had received in addition the splinters of the first shells which the French guns had fired before night-fall, from the top of the hills near Corvigny.

Paul pulled out the fragments of shell and removed the golden strands, which he put away religiously. He and Bernard then entered the lodge, where the Red Cross men had established a temporary ambulance. They found the Oberleutnant lying on a truss of straw, well looked after and able to answer questions.

One point at once became quite clear, which was that the German troops which had garrisoned the Château d'Ornequin had, so to speak, never been in touch at all with those which, the day before, had retreated from Corvigny and the adjoining forts. The garrison had been evacuated immediately upon the arrival of the fighting troops, as though to avoid any indiscretion on the subject of what had happened during the occupation of the château.

"At that moment," said the Oberleutnant, who belonged to the fighting force, not to the garrison, "it was seven o'clock in the evening. Your seventy-fives had already got the range of the château; and we found no one there but a number of generals and other officers of superior rank. Their baggage-wagons were leaving and their motors were ready to leave. I was ordered to hold out as long as I could to blow up the château. The major had made all the arrangements beforehand."

"What was the major's name?"

"I don't know. He was walking about with a young officer whom even the generals addressed with respect. This same officer called me over to him and charged me to obey the major 'as I would the emperor.'"

"And who was the young officer?"

"Prince Conrad."

"A son of the Kaiser's?"

"Yes. He left the château yesterday, late in the day."

"And did the major spend the night here?"

"I suppose so; at any rate, he was there this morning. We fired the mines and left . . . a bit late, for I was wounded near this lodge . . . near the wall. . . ."

Paul mastered his emotion and said:

"You mean, the wall against which your people shot three French civilians, don't you?"

"Yes."

"When were they shot?"

"About six o'clock in the afternoon, I believe, before we arrived from Corvigny."

"Who ordered them to be shot?"

"The major."

Paul felt the perspiration trickling from the top of his head down his neck and forehead. It was as he thought: Élisabeth had been shot by the orders of that nameless and more than mysterious individual whose face was the very image of the face of Hermine d'Andeville, Élisabeth's mother!

He went on, in a trembling voice:

"So there were three people shot? You're quite sure?"

"Yes, the people of the château. They had been guilty of treachery."

"A man and two women?"

"Yes."

"But there were only two bodies fastened to the wall of the lodge."

"Yes, only two. The major had the lady of the house buried by Prince Conrad's orders."

"Where?"

"He didn't tell me."

"But why was she shot?"

"I understand that she had got hold of some very important secrets."

"They could have taken her away and kept her as a prisoner."

"Certainly, but Prince Conrad was tired of her."

Paul gave a start:

"What's that you say?"

The officer resumed, with a smile that might mean anything:

"Well, damn it all, everybody knows Prince Conrad! He's the Don Juan of the family. He'd been staying at the château for some weeks and had time to make an impression, had he not? . . . And then . . . and then to get tired. . . . Besides, the major maintained that the woman and her two servants had tried to poison the prince. So you see . . ."

He did not finish his sentence. Paul was bending over him and, with a face distorted with rage, took him by the throat and shouted:

"Another word, you dog, and I'll throttle the life out of you! Ah, you can thank your stars that you're wounded! . . . If you weren't . . . if you weren't . . . !"

And Bernard, beside himself with rage, joined in:

"Yes, you can think yourself lucky. As for your Prince Conrad, he's a swine, let me tell you . . . and I mean to tell him so to his face. . . . He's a swine like all his beastly family and like the whole lot of you! . . ."

They left the Oberleutnant utterly dazed and unable to understand a word of this sudden outburst. But, once outside, Paul had a fit of despair. His nerves relaxed. All his anger and all his hatred were changed into infinite depression. He could hardly contain his tears.

"Come, Paul," exclaimed Bernard, "surely you don't believe a word . . . ?"

"No, no, and again no! But I can guess what happened. That drunken brute of a prince must have tried to make eyes at Élisabeth and to take advantage of his position. Just think! A woman, alone and defenseless: that was a conquest worth making! What tortures the poor darling must have undergone, what humiliations! . . . A daily struggle, with threats and brutalities. . . . And, at the last moment, death, to punish her for her resistance. . . ."

"We shall avenge her, Paul," said Bernard, in a low voice.

"We shall; but shall I ever forget that it was on my account, through my fault, that she stayed here? I will explain what I mean later on; and you will understand how hard and unjust I have been. . . . And yet . . ."

He stood gloomily thinking. He was haunted by the image of the major and he repeated:

"And yet . . . and yet . . . there are things that seem so strange. . . ."

All that afternoon, French troops kept streaming in through the valley of the Liseron and the village of Ornequin in order to resist any counter-attack by the enemy. Paul's section was resting; and he and Bernard took advantage of this to make a minute search in the park and among the ruins of the château. But there was no clue to reveal to them where Élisabeth's body lay hidden.

At five o'clock, they gave Rosalie and Jérôme a decent burial. Two crosses were set up on a little mound strewn with flowers. An army chaplain came and said the prayers for the dead. And Paul was moved to tears when he knelt on the grave of those two faithful servants whose devotion had been their undoing.

Then also Paul promised to avenge. And his longing for vengeance evoked in his mind, with almost painful intensity, the hated image of the major, that image which had now become inseparable from his recollections of the Comtesse d'Andeville.

He led Bernard away from the grave and asked:

"Are you sure that you were not mistaken in connecting the major and the supposed peasant-woman who questioned you at Corvigny?"

"Absolutely."

"Then come with me. I told you of a woman's portrait. We will go and look at it and you shall tell me what impression it makes upon you."

Paul had noticed that that part of the castle which contained Hermine d'Andeville's bedroom and boudoir had not been entirely demolished by the explosion of either the mines or shells. It was possible that the boudoir was still in its former condition.

The staircase had been destroyed; and they had to clamber up the shattered masonry in order to reach the first floor. Traces of the corridor were visible here and there. All the doors were gone; and the rooms presented an appearance of pitiful chaos.

"It's here," said Paul, pointing to an open place between two pieces of wall that remained standing as by a miracle.

It was indeed Hermine d'Andeville's boudoir, shattered and dilapidated, cracked from top to bottom and filled with plaster and rubbish, but quite recognizable and containing all the furniture which Paul had noticed on the evening of his marriage. The window-shutters darkened the room partly, but there was enough light for Paul to see the whereabouts of the wall opposite. And he at once exclaimed:

"The portrait has been taken away!"

It was a great disappointment to him and, at the same time, a proof of the great importance which his enemy attached to the portrait, which could only have been removed because it constituted an overwhelming piece of evidence.

"I assure you," said Bernard, "that this does not affect my opinion in the least. There was no need to verify my conviction about the major and that peasant-woman at Corvigny. Whose portrait was it?"

"I told you, a woman."

"What woman? Was it a picture which my father hung there, one of the pictures of his collection?"

"That was it," said Paul, welcoming the opportunity of throwing his brother-in-law off the scent.

Opening one of the shutters, he saw a mark on the wall of the rectangular space which the picture used to occupy; and he was able to perceive, from certain details, that the removal had been effected in a hurry. For instance, the gilt scroll had dropped from the frame and was lying on the floor. Paul picked it up stealthily so that Bernard should not see the inscription engraved upon it.

But, while he was examining the panel more attentively after Bernard had unfastened the other shutter, he gave an exclamation.

"What's the matter?" asked Bernard.

"There . . . look . . . that signature on the wall . . . where the picture was: a signature and a date."

It was written in pencil; two lines across the white plaster, at a man's height. The date, "Wednesday evening, 16 September, 1914," followed by the signature: "Major Hermann."

Major Hermann! Even before Paul was aware of it, his eyes had seized upon a detail in which all the significance of those two lines of writing was concentrated; and, while Bernard came forward to look in his turn, he muttered, in boundless surprise:

"Hermann! . . . Hermine! . . ."

The two words were almost alike. Hermine began with the same letters as the Christian or surname which the major had written, after his rank, on the wall. Major Hermann! The Comtesse Hermine! H, E, R, M: The four letters on the dagger with which Paul had nearly been killed! H, E, R, M: the four letters on the dagger of the spy whom he had captured in the church-steeple!

Bernard said:

"It looks to me like a woman's writing. But, if so. . . ." And he continued thoughtfully, "If so . . . what conclusion are we to draw? Either the peasant-woman and Major Hermann are one and the same person, which means that the peasant-woman is a man or that the major is not, or else we are dealing with two distinct persons, a woman and a man. I believe that is how it is, in spite of the uncanny resemblance between that man and that woman. For, after all, how can we suppose that the same person can have written this signature yesterday evening, passed through the French lines and spoken to me at Corvigny disguised as a peasant-woman . . . and then be able to return here, disguised as a German major, blow up the house, take to flight and, after killing some of his own soldiers, make his escape in a motor-car?"

Paul, absorbed by his thoughts, did not answer. Presently he went into the adjoining room, which separated the boudoir from the set of rooms which his wife had occupied. Of these nothing remained except debris. But the room in between had not suffered so very much; and it was very easy to see, by the wash-hand-stand and the condition of the bed, that it was used as a bedroom and that some one had slept in it the night before.

On the table Paul found some German newspapers and a French one, dated 10 September, in which the communiqué telling of the great victory of the Marne was struck out with two great dashes in red pencil and annotated with the word "Lies!" followed by the initial H.

"We're in Major Hermann's room right enough," said Paul to Bernard.

"And Major Hermann," Bernard declared, "burnt some compromising papers last night. Look at that heap of ashes in the fire-place." He stooped and picked up a few envelopes, a few half-burnt sheets of paper containing consecutive words, nothing but incoherent sentences. On turning his eyes to the bed, however, he saw under the bolster a parcel of clothes hidden or perhaps forgotten in the hurry of departure. He pulled them out and at once cried: "I say, just look at this!"

"At what?" asked Paul, who was searching another part of the room.

"These clothes, look, peasant clothes, the clothes I saw on the woman at Corvigny. There's no mistaking them: they are the same brown color and the same sort of serge stuff. And then here's the black-lace scarf which I told you about. . . ."

"What's that?" exclaimed Paul, running up to him.

"Here, see for yourself, it's a scarf of sorts and not one of the newest, either. How worn and torn it is! And the brooch I described to you is still in it. Do you see?"

Paul had noticed the brooch at once with the greatest horror. What a terrible significance it lent to the discovery of the clothes in the room occupied by Major Hermann, the room next to Hermine d'Andeville's boudoir! The cameo was carved with a swan with its wings outspread and was set in a gold snake with ruby eyes. Paul had known that cameo since his early boyhood, from seeing it in the dress of the woman who killed his father, and he knew it also because he had seen it again, with every smallest detail reproduced, in the Comtesse Hermine's portrait. And now he was finding the actual brooch, stuck in the black-lace scarf among the Corvigny peasant-woman's clothes and left behind in Major Hermann's room!

"This completes the evidence," said Bernard. "The fact that the clothes are here proves that the woman who asked me about you came back here last night; but what is the connection between her and that officer who is her living likeness? Is the person who questioned me about you the same as the individual who ordered Élisabeth to be shot two hours earlier? And who are these people? What band of murderers and spies have we run up against?"

"They are simply Germans," was Paul's reply. "To them spying and murdering are natural and permissible forms of warfare . . . in a war, mark you, which they began and are carrying on in the midst of a perfectly peaceful period. I have told you so before, Bernard: we have been the victims of war for nearly twenty years. My father's murder opened the tragedy. And to-day we are mourning our poor Élisabeth. And that is not the end of it."

"Still," said Bernard, "he has taken to flight."

"We shall see him again, be sure of that. If he doesn't come back, I will go and find him. And, when that day comes. . . ."

There were two easy-chairs in the room. Paul and Bernard resolved to spend the night there and, without further delay, wrote their names on the wall of the passage. Then Paul went back to his men, in order to see that they were comfortably settled in the barns and out-houses that remained standing. Here the soldier who served as his orderly, a decent Auvergnat called Gériflour, told him that he had dug out two pairs of sheets and a couple of clean mattresses from a little house next to the guard-room and that the beds were ready. Paul accepted the offer for Bernard and himself. It was arranged that Gériflour and one of his companions should go to the château and sleep in the two easy-chairs.

The night passed without any alarm. It was a feverish and sleepless night for Paul, who was haunted by the thought of Élisabeth. In the morning he fell into a heavy slumber, disturbed by nightmares. The reveille woke him with a start. Bernard was waiting for him.

The roll was called in the courtyard of the château. Paul noticed that his orderly, Gériflour, and the other man were missing.

"They must be asleep," he said to Bernard. "Let's go and shake them awake."

They went back, through the ruins, to the first floor and along the demolished bedroom. In the room which Major Hermann had occupied they found Private Gériflour, huddled on the bed, covered with blood, dead. His friend was lying back in one of the chairs, also dead. There was no disorder, no trace of a struggle around the bodies. The two soldiers must have been killed in their sleep.

Paul at once saw the weapon with which they had been murdered. It was a dagger with the letters H, E, R, M. on the handle.

CHAPTER VIII
ÉLISABETH'S DIARY

This double murder, following upon a series of tragic incidents all of which were closely connected, was the climax to such an accumulation of horrors and of shocking disasters that the two young men did not utter a word or stir a limb. Death, whose breath they had already felt so often on the battlefield, had never appeared to them under a more hateful or forbidding guise.

Death! They beheld it, not as an insidious disease that strikes at hazard, but as a specter creeping in the shadow, watching its adversary, choosing its moment and raising its arm with deliberate intention. And this specter bore for them the very shape and features of Major Hermann.

When Paul spoke at last, his voice had the dull, scared tone that seems to summon up the evil powers of darkness:

"He came last night. He came and, as we had written our names on the wall, the names of Bernard d'Andeville and Paul Delroze which represent the names of two enemies in his eyes, he took the opportunity to rid himself of those two enemies. Persuaded that it was you and I who were sleeping in this room, he struck . . . and those whom he struck were poor Gériflour and his friend, who have died in our stead."

After a long pause, he whispered:

"They have died as my father died . . . and as Élisabeth died . . . and the keeper also and his wife; and by the same hand, by the same hand, Bernard, do you understand? . . . Yes, it's inadmissible, is it not? My brain refuses to admit it. . . . And yet it is always the same hand that holds the dagger . . . then and now."

Bernard examined the dagger. At the sight of the four letters, he said:

"That stands for Hermann, I suppose? Major Hermann?"

"Yes," said Paul, eagerly. "Is it his real name, though? And who is he actually? I don't know. But what I do know is that the criminal who committed all those murders is the same who signs with these four letters, H, E, R, M."

After giving the alarm to the men of his section and sending to inform the chaplain and the surgeons, Paul resolved to ask for a private interview with his colonel and to tell him the whole of the secret story, hoping that it might throw some light on the execution of Élisabeth and the assassination of the two soldiers. But he learnt that the colonel and his regiment were fighting on the other side of the frontier and that the 3rd Company had been hurriedly sent for, all but a detachment which was to remain at the château under Sergeant Delroze's orders. Paul therefore made his own investigation with his men.

It yielded nothing. There was no possibility of discovering the least clue to the manner in which the murderer had made his way first into the park, next into the ruins and lastly into the bedroom. As no civilian had passed, were they to conclude that the perpetrator of the two crimes was one of the privates of the 3rd company? Obviously not. And yet what other theory was there to adopt?

Nor did Paul discover anything to tell him of his wife's death or of the place where she was buried. And this was the hardest trial of all.

He encountered the same ignorance among the German wounded as among the prisoners. They had all heard of the execution of a man and two women, but they had all arrived after the execution and after the departure of the troops that occupied the château.

He went on to the village, thinking that they might know something there; that the inhabitants had some news to tell of the lady of the château, of the life she led, of her martyrdom and death. But Ornequin was empty, with not a woman even, not an old man left in it. The enemy must have sent all the inhabitants into Germany, doubtless from the start, with the manifest object of destroying every witness to his actions during the occupation and of creating a desert around the château.

Paul in this way devoted three days to the pursuit of fruitless inquiries.

"And yet," he said to Bernard, "Élisabeth cannot have disappeared entirely. Even if I cannot find her grave, can I not find the least trace of her existence? She lived here. She suffered here. I would give anything for a relic of her."

They had succeeded in fixing upon the exact site of the room in which she used to sleep and even, in the midst of the ruins, the exact heap of stones and plaster that remained of it. It was all mixed up with the wreckage of the ground-floor rooms, into which the first-floor ceilings had been precipitated; and it was in this chaos, under the pile of walls and furniture reduced to dust and fragments, that one morning he picked up a little broken mirror, followed by a tortoise-shell hair-brush, a silver pen-knife and a set of scissors, all of which had belonged to Élisabeth.

But what affected him even more was the discovery of a thick diary, in which he knew that his wife, before her marriage, used to note down her expenses, the errands or visits that had to be remembered and, occasionally, some more private details of her life. Now all that was left of her diary was the binding, with the date, 1914, and the part containing the entries for the first seven months of the year. All the sheets for the last five months had been not torn out but removed separately from the strings that fastened them to the binding.

Paul at once thought to himself:

"They were removed by Élisabeth, removed at her leisure, at a time when there was no hurry and when she merely wished to use those pages for writing on from day to day. What would she want to write? Just those more personal notes which she used formerly to put down in her diary between the entry of a disbursement and a receipt. And as there can have been no accounts to keep since my departure and as her existence was nothing but a hideous tragedy, there is no doubt that she confided her distress to those pages, her complaints, possibly her shrinking from me."

That day, in Bernard's absence, Paul increased the thoroughness of his search. He rummaged under every stone and in every hole. The broken slabs of marble, the twisted lustres, the torn carpets, the beams blackened by the flames, he lifted them all. He persisted for hours. He divided the ruins into sections which he examined patiently in rotation; and, when the ruins refused to answer his questions, he renewed his minute investigations in the ground.

His efforts were useless; and Paul knew that they were bound to be so. Élisabeth must have attached far too much value to those pages not to have either destroyed them or hidden them beyond the possibility of discovery. Unless:

"Unless," he said to himself, "they have been stolen from her. The major must have kept a constant watch upon her. And, in that case, who knows?"

An idea occurred to Paul's mind. After finding the peasant-woman's clothes and black lace scarf, he had left them on the bed, attaching no further importance to them; and he now asked himself if the major, on the night when he had murdered the two soldiers, had not come with the intention of fetching away the clothes, or at least the contents of their pockets, which he had not been able to do because they were hidden under Private Gériflour, who was sleeping on the top of them. Now Paul seemed to remember that, when unfolding that peasant's skirt and bodice, he had noticed a rustling of paper in one of the pockets. Was it not reasonable to conclude that this was Élisabeth's diary, which had been discovered and stolen by Major Hermann?

Paul hastened to the room in which the murders had been committed, snatched up the clothes and looked through them:

"Ah," he at once exclaimed, with genuine delight, "here they are!"

There was a large, yellow envelope filled with the pages removed from the diary. These were crumpled and here and there torn; and Paul saw at a glance that the pages corresponded only with the months of August and September and that even some days in each of these months were missing.

And he saw Élisabeth's handwriting.

It was not a full or detailed diary. It consisted merely of notes, poor little notes in which a bruised heart found an outlet. At times, when they ran to greater length, an extra page had been added. The notes had been jotted down by day or night, anyhow, in ink and pencil; they were sometimes hardly legible; and they gave the impression of a trembling hand, of eyes veiled with tears and of a mind crazed with suffering.

Paul was moved to the very depths of his being. He was alone and he read:

"Sunday, 2 August.

"He ought not to have written me that letter. It is too cruel. And why does he suggest that I should leave Ornequin? The war? Does he think that, because there is a chance of war, I shall not have the courage to stay here and do my duty? How little he knows me! Then he must either think me a coward or believe me capable of suspecting my poor mother! . . . Paul, dear Paul, you ought not to have left me. . . .

"Monday, 3 August.

"Jérôme and Rosalie have been kinder and more thoughtful than ever, now that the servants are gone. Rosalie begged and prayed that I should go away, too.

"'And what about yourselves, Rosalie?' I said. 'Will you go?'

"'Oh, we're people who don't matter, we have nothing to fear! Besides, our place is here.'

"I said that so was mine; but I saw that she could not understand.

"Jérôme, when I meet him, shakes his head and looks at me sadly.

"Tuesday, 4 August.

"I have not the least doubt of what my duty is. I would rather die than turn my back on it. But how am I to fulfil that duty and get at the truth? I am full of courage; and yet I am always crying, as though I had nothing better to do. The fact is that I am always thinking of Paul. Where is he? What has become of him? When Jérôme told me this morning that war was declared, I thought that I should faint. So Paul is going to fight. He will be wounded perhaps. He may be killed. God knows if my true place is not somewhere near him, in a town close to where he is fighting! What have I to hope for in staying here? My duty to my mother, yes, I know. Ah, mother, I beseech your forgiveness . . . but, you see, I love my husband and I am so afraid of anything happening to him! . . .

"Thursday, 6 August.

"Still crying. I grow unhappier every day. But I feel that, even if I became still more so, I would not desist. Besides, how can I go to him when he does not want to have anything more to do with me and does not even write? Love me? Why, he loathes me! I am the daughter of a woman whom he hates above all things in the world. How unspeakably horrible! If he thinks like that of my mother and if I fail in my task, we shall never see each other again! That is the life I have before me.

"Friday, 7 August.

"I have made Jérôme and Rosalie tell me all about mother. They only knew her for a few weeks, but they remember her quite well; and what they said made me feel so happy! She was so good, it seems, and so pretty; everybody worshiped her.

"'She was not always very cheerful,' said Rosalie. 'I don't know if it was her illness already affecting her spirits, but there was something about her, when she smiled, that went to one's heart.'

"My poor, darling mother!

"Saturday, 8 August.

"We heard the guns this morning, a long way off. They are fighting 25 miles away.

"Some French soldiers have arrived. I had seen some of them pretty often from the terrace, marching down the Liseron Valley. But these are going to stay at the house. The captain made his apologies. So as not to inconvenience me, he and his lieutenants will sleep and have their meals in the lodge where Jérôme and Rosalie used to live.

"Sunday, 9 August.

"Still no news of Paul. I have given up trying to write to him either. I don't want him to hear from me until I have all the proofs. But what am I to do? How can I get proofs of something that happened seventeen years ago? Hunt about, think and reflect as I may, I can find nothing.

"Monday, 10 August.

"The guns never ceased booming in the distance. Nevertheless, the captain tells me that there is nothing to make one expect an attack by the enemy on this side.

"Tuesday, 11 August.

"A sentry posted in the woods, near the little door leading out of the estate, has just been killed—stabbed with a knife. They think that he must have been trying to stop a man who wanted to get out of the park. But how did the man get in?

"Wednesday, 12 August.

"What can be happening? Here is something that has made a great impression on me and seems impossible to understand. There are other things besides which are just as perplexing, though I can't say why. I am much astonished that the captain and all his soldiers whom I meet appear so indifferent and should even be able to make jokes among themselves. I feel the sort of depression that comes over one when a storm is at hand. There must be something wrong with my nerves.

"Well, this morning. . . ."

Paul stopped reading. The lower portion of the page containing the last few lines and the whole of the next page were torn out. It looked as if the major, after stealing Élisabeth's diary, had, for reasons best known to himself, removed the pages in which she set forth a certain incident.

The diary continued:

"Friday, 14 August.

"I felt I must tell the captain. I took him to the dead tree covered with ivy and asked him to lie down on the ground and listen. He did so very patiently and attentively. But he heard nothing and ended by saying:

"'You see, madame, that everything is absolutely normal.'

"'I assure you,' I answered, 'that two days ago there was a confused sound from this tree, just at this spot. And it lasted for several minutes.'

"He replied, smiling as he spoke:

"'We could easily have the tree cut down. But don't you think, madame, that in the state of nervous tension in which we all are we are liable to make mistakes; that we are subject to hallucinations? For, after all, where could the sound come from?'

"Of course, he was right. And yet I had heard and seen for myself. . . .

"Saturday, 15 August.

"Yesterday, two German officers were brought in and were locked up in the wash-house, at the end of the yard. This morning, there was nothing in the wash-house but their uniforms. One can understand their breaking open the door. But the captain has found out that they made their escape in French uniforms and that they passed the sentries, saying that they had been sent to Corvigny.

"Who can have supplied them with those uniforms? Besides, they had to know the password: who can have given them that?

"It appears that a peasant woman called several days in succession with eggs and milk, a woman rather too well-dressed for her station, and that she hasn't been here to-day. But there is nothing to prove her complicity.

"Sunday, 16 August.

"The captain has been strongly urging me to go away. He is no longer cheerful. He seems very much preoccupied:

"'We are surrounded by spies,' he said. 'And there is every sign of the possibility of a speedy attack. Not a big attack, intended to force a way through to Corvigny, but an attempt to take the château by surprise. It is my duty to warn you, madame, that we may be compelled at any moment to fall back on Corvigny and that it would be most imprudent for you to stay.'

"I answered that nothing would change my resolution. Jérôme and Rosalie also implored me to leave. But what is the good? I intend to remain."

Once again Paul stopped. There was a page missing in this section of the diary; and the next page, the one headed 18 August, was torn at the top and the bottom and contained only a fragment of what Élisabeth had written on that day:

". . . and that is why I have not spoken of it in the letter which I have just sent to Paul. He will know that I am staying on and the reasons for my decision; but he must not know of my hopes.

"Those hopes are still so vague and built on so insignificant a detail. Still, I feel overjoyed. I do not realize the meaning of that detail, but I feel its importance. The captain is hurrying about, increasing the patrols; the soldiers are polishing their arms and crying out for the battle; the enemy may be taking up his quarters at Èbrecourt, as they say: what do I care? I have only one thought: have I found the key? Am I on the right road? Let me think. . . ."

The page was torn here, at the place where Élisabeth was about to explain things exactly. Was this a precautionary measure on Major Hermann's part? No doubt; but why?

The first part of the page headed 19 August was likewise torn. The nineteenth was the day before that on which the Germans had carried Ornequin, Corvigny and the whole district by assault. What had Élisabeth written on that Wednesday afternoon? What had she discovered? What was preparing in the darkness?

Paul felt a dread at his heart. He remembered that the first gunshot had thundered over Corvigny at two o'clock in the morning on Thursday and it was with an anxious mind that he read, on the second half of the page:

"11 p. m.

"I have got up and opened my window. Dogs are barking on every side. They answer one another, stop, seem to be listening and then begin howling again as I have never heard them do before. When they cease, the silence becomes impressive and I listen in my turn to try and catch the indistinct sounds that keep them awake.

"Those sounds seem to my ears also to exist. It is something different from the rustling of the leaves. It has nothing to do with the ordinary interruption to the dead silence of the night. It comes from I can't tell where; and the impression it makes on me is so powerful that I ask myself at the same time whether I am just listening to the beating of my heart or whether I am hearing what might be the distant tramp of a marching army.

"Oh, I must be mad! A marching army! And our outposts on the frontier? And our sentries all around the château? Why, there would be fighting, firing! . . .

"1 a. m.

"I did not stir from the window. The dogs were no longer barking. Everything was asleep. And suddenly I saw some one come from under the trees and go across the lawn. I at first imagined it was one of our soldiers. But, when whoever it was passed under my window, there was just enough light in the sky for me to make out a woman's figure. I thought for a moment of Rosalie. But no, the figure was taller and moved with a lighter and quicker step.

"I was on the point of waking Jérôme and giving the alarm. I did not, however. The figure had disappeared in the direction of the terrace. And all at once there came the cry of a bird, which struck me as strange. This was followed by a light that darted into the sky, like a shooting star springing from the ground.

"After that, nothing. Silence, general restfulness. Nothing more. And yet I dare not go back to bed. I am frightened, without knowing why. All sorts of dangers seem to come rushing from every corner of the horizon. They draw closer, they surround me, they hem me in, they suffocate me, crush me, I can't breathe. I'm frightened . . . I'm frightened. . . ."

CHAPTER IX
A SPRIG OF EMPIRE

Paul clutched with convulsive fingers the heart-breaking diary to which Élisabeth had confided her anguish:

"The poor angel!" he thought. "What she must have gone through! And this is only the beginning of the road that led to her death. . . ."

He dreaded reading on. The hours of torture were near at hand, menacing and implacable, and he would have liked to call out to Élisabeth:

"Go away, go away! Don't defy Fate! I have forgotten the past. I love you."

It was too late. He himself, through his cruelty, had condemned her to suffer; and he must go on to the bitter end and witness every station of the Calvary of which he knew the last, terrifying stage.

He hastily turned the pages. There were first three blank leaves, those dated 20, 21 and 22 August: days of confusion during which she had been unable to write. The pages of the 23rd and 24th were missing. These no doubt recounted what had happened and contained revelations concerning the inexplicable invasion.

The diary began again at the middle of a torn page, the page belonging to Tuesday the 25th:

"'Yes, Rosalie, I feel quite well and I thank you for looking after me so attentively.'

"'Then there's no more fever?'

"'No, Rosalie, it's gone.'

"'You said the same thing yesterday, ma'am, and the fever came back . . . perhaps because of that visit. . . . But the visit won't be to-day . . . it's not till to-morrow. . . . I was told to let you know, ma'am. . . . At 5 o'clock to-morrow. . . .'

"I made no answer. What is the use of rebelling? None of the humiliating words that I shall have to hear will hurt me more than what lies before my eyes: the lawn invaded, horses picketed all over it, baggage wagons and caissons in the walks, half the trees felled, officers sprawling on the grass, drinking and singing, and a German flag flapping from the balcony of my window, just in front of me. Oh, the wretches!

"I close my eyes so as not to see. And that makes it more horrible still. . . . Oh, the memory of that night . . . and, in the morning, when the sun rose, the sight of all those dead bodies! Some of the poor fellows were still alive, with those monsters dancing round them; and I could hear the cries of the dying men asking to be put out of their misery.

"And then. . . . But I won't think of it or think of anything that can destroy my courage and my hope. . . .

"Paul, I always have you in my mind as I write my diary. Something tells me that you will read it if anything happens to me; and so I must have strength to go on with it and to keep you informed from day to day. Perhaps you can already understand from my story what to me still seems very obscure. What is the connection between the past and the present, between the murder of long ago and the incomprehensible attack of the other night? I don't know. I have told you the facts in detail and also my theories. You will draw your conclusions and follow up the truth to the end.

"Wednesday, 26 August.

"There is a great deal of noise in the château. People are moving about everywhere, especially in the rooms above my bedroom. An hour ago, half a dozen motor vans and the same number of motor cars drove onto the lawn. The vans were empty. Two or three ladies sprang out of each of the cars, German women, waving their hands and laughing noisily. The officers ran up to welcome them; and there were loud expressions of delight. Then they all went to the house. What do they want?

"But I hear footsteps in the passage. . . . It is 5 o'clock. . . . Somebody is knocking at the door. . . .

"There were five of them: he first and four officers who kept bowing to him obsequiously. He said to them, in a formal tone:

"'Attention, gentlemen. . . . I order you not to touch anything in this room or in the other rooms reserved for madame. As for the rest, except in the two big drawing-rooms, it is yours. Keep anything here that you want and take away what you please. It is war and the law of war.'

"He pronounced those words, 'The law of war,' in a tone of fatuous conviction and repeated:

"'As for madame's private apartments, not a thing is to be moved. Do you understand? I know what is becoming.'

"He looked at me as though to say:

"'What do you think of that? There's chivalry for you! I could take it all, if I liked; but I'm a German and, as such, I know what's becoming.'

"He seemed to expect me to thank him. I said:

"'Is this the pillage beginning? That explains the empty motor vans.'

"'You don't pillage what belongs to you by the law of war,' he answered.

"'I see. And the law of war does not extend to the furniture and pictures in the drawing-rooms?'

"He turned crimson. Then I began to laugh:

"'I follow you,' I said. 'That's your share. Well chosen. Nothing but rare and valuable things. The refuse your servants can divide among them.'

"The officers turned round furiously. He became redder still. He had a face that was quite round, hair, which was too light, plastered down with grease and divided in the middle by a faultless parting. His forehead was low; and I was able to guess the effort going on behind it, to find a repartee. At last he came up to me and, in a voice of triumph, said:

"'The French have been beaten at Charleroi, beaten at Morange, beaten everywhere. They are retreating all along the line. The upshot of the war is settled.'

"Violent though my grief was, I did not wince. I whispered:

"'You low blackguard!'

"He staggered. His companions caught what I said; and I saw one put his hand on his sword-hilt. But what would he himself do? What would he say? I could feel that he was greatly embarrassed and that I had wounded his self-esteem.

"'Madame,' he said, 'I daresay you don't know who I am?'

"'Oh, yes!' I answered. 'You are Prince Conrad, a son of the Kaiser's. And what then?'

"He made a fresh attempt at dignity. He drew himself up. I expected threats and words to express his anger; but no, his reply was a burst of laughter, the affected laughter of a high and mighty lord, too indifferent, too disdainful to take offense, too intelligent to lose his temper.

"'The dear little Frenchwoman! Isn't she charming, gentlemen? Did you hear what she said? The impertinence of her! There's your true Parisian, gentlemen, with all her roguish grace.'

"And, making me a great bow, with not another word, he stalked away, joking as he went:

"'Such a dear little Frenchwoman! Ah, gentlemen, those little Frenchwomen! . . .'

"The vans were at work all day, going off to the frontier laden with booty. It was my poor father's wedding present to us, all his collections so patiently and fondly brought together; it was the dear setting in which Paul and I were to have lived. What a wrench the parting means to me!

"The war news is bad! I cried a great deal during the day.

"Prince Conrad came. I had to receive him, for he sent me word by Rosalie that, if I refused to see him, the inhabitants of Ornequin would suffer the consequences."

Here Élisabeth again broke off her diary. Two days later, on the 29th, she went on:

"He came yesterday. To-day also. He tries to appear witty and cultured. He talks literature and music, Goethe, Wagner and so on. . . . I leave him to do his own talking, however; and this throws him in such a state of fury that he ended by exclaiming:

"'Can't you answer? It's no disgrace, even for a Frenchwoman, to talk to Prince Conrad of Prussia!'

"'A woman doesn't talk to her gaoler.'

"He protested briskly:

"'But, dash it all, you're not in prison!'

"'Can I leave the château?'

"'You can walk about . . . in the grounds. . . .'

"'Between four walls, therefore, like a prisoner.'

"'Well, what do you want to do?'

"'To go away from here and live . . . wherever you tell me to: at Corvigny, for instance.'

"'That is to say, away from me!'

"As I did not answer, he bent forward a little and continued, in a low voice:

"'You hate me, don't you? Oh, I'm quite aware of it! I've made a study of women. Only, it's Prince Conrad whom you hate, isn't it? It's the German, the conqueror. For, after all, there's no reason why you should dislike the man himself. . . . And, at this moment, it's the man who is in question, who is trying to please you . . . do you understand? . . . So. . . .'

"I had risen to my feet and faced him. I did not speak a single word; but he must have seen in my eyes so great an expression of disgust that he stopped in the middle of his sentence, looking absolutely stupid. Then, his nature getting the better of him, he shook his fist at me, like a common fellow, and went off slamming the door and muttering threats. . . ."

The next two pages of the diary were missing. Paul was gray in the face. He had never suffered to such an extent as this. It seemed to him as though his poor dear Élisabeth were still alive before his eyes and feeling his eyes upon her. And nothing could have upset him more than the cry of distress and love which marked the page headed:

1 September.

"Paul, my own Paul, have no fear. Yes, I tore up those two pages because I did not wish you ever to know such revolting things. But that will not estrange you from me, will it? Because a savage dared to insult me, that is no reason, surely, why I should not be worthy of your love? Oh, the things he said to me, Paul, only yesterday: his offensive remarks, his hateful threats, his even more infamous promises . . . and then his rage! . . . No, I will not repeat them to you. In making a confidant of this diary, I meant to confide to you my daily acts and thoughts. I believed that I was only writing down the evidence of my grief. But this is something different; and I have not the courage. . . . Forgive my silence. It will be enough for you to know the offense, so that you may avenge me later. Ask me no more. . . ."

And, pursuing this intention, Élisabeth now ceased to describe Prince Conrad's daily visits in detail; but it was easy to perceive from her narrative that the enemy persisted in hovering round her. It consisted of brief notes in which she no longer let herself go as before, notes which she jotted down at random, marking the days herself, without troubling about the printed headings.

Paul trembled as he read on. And fresh revelations aggravated his dread:

"Thursday.

"Rosalie asks them the news every morning. The French retreat is continuing. They even say that it has developed into a rout and that Paris has been abandoned. The government has fled. We are done for.

"Seven o'clock in the evening.

"He is walking under my windows as usual. He has with him a woman whom I have already seen many times at a distance and who always wears a great peasant's cloak and a lace scarf which hides her face. But, as a rule, when he walks on the lawn he is accompanied by an officer whom they call the major. This man also keeps his head concealed, by turning up the collar of his gray cloak.

"Friday.

"The soldiers are dancing on the lawn, while their band plays German national hymns and the bells of Ornequin are kept ringing with all their might. They are celebrating the entrance of their troops into Paris. It must be true, I fear! Their joy is the best proof of the truth.

"Saturday.

"Between my rooms and the boudoir where mother's portrait used to hang is the room that was mother's bedroom. This is now occupied by the major. He is an intimate friend of the prince and an important person, so they say. The soldiers know him only as Major Hermann. He does not humble himself in the prince's presence as the other officers do. On the contrary, he seems to address him with a certain familiarity.

"At this minute they are walking side by side on the gravel path. The prince is leaning on Major Hermann's arm. I feel sure that they are talking about me and that they are not at one. It looks almost as if Major Hermann were angry.

"Ten o'clock in the morning.

"I was right. Rosalie tells me that they had a violent scene.

"Tuesday, 8 September.

"There is something strange in the behavior of all of them. The prince, the major and the other officers appear to be nervous about something. The soldiers have ceased singing. There are sounds of quarreling. Can things be turning in our favor?"

"Thursday.

"The excitement is increasing. It seems that couriers keep on arriving at every moment. The officers have sent part of their baggage into Germany. I am full of hope. But, on the other hand. . . .

"Oh, my dear Paul, if you knew the torture those visits cause me! . . . He is no longer the bland and honey-mouthed man of the early days. He has thrown off the mask. . . . But, no, no, I will not speak of that! . . .

"Friday.

"The whole of the village of Ornequin has been packed off to Germany. They don't want a single witness to remain of what happened during the awful night which I described to you.

"Sunday evening.

"They are defeated and retreating far from Paris. He confessed as much, grinding his teeth and uttering threats against me as he spoke. I am the hostage on whom they are revenging themselves. . . .

"Tuesday.

"Paul, if ever you meet him in battle, kill him like a dog. But do those people fight? Oh, I don't know what I'm saying! My head is going round and round. Why did I stay here? You ought to have taken me away, Paul, by force. . . .

"Paul, what do you think he has planned? Oh, the dastard! They have kept twelve of the Ornequin villagers as hostages; and it is I, it is I who am responsible for their lives! . . . Do you understand the horror of it? They will live, or they will be shot, one by one, according to my behavior. . . . The thing seems too infamous to believe. Is he only trying to frighten me? Oh, the shamefulness of such a threat! What a hell to find one's self in! I would rather die. . . .

"Nine o'clock in the evening.

"Die? No! Why should I die? Rosalie has been. Her husband has come to an understanding with one of the sentries who will be on duty to-night at the little door in the wall, beyond the chapel. Rosalie is to wake me up at three in the morning and we shall run away to the big wood, where Jérôme knows of an inaccessible shelter. Heavens, if we can only succeed! . . .

"Eleven o'clock.

"What has happened? Why have I got up? It's only a nightmare. I am sure of that; and yet I am shaking with fever and hardly able to write. . . . And why am I afraid to drink the glass of water by my bedside, as I am accustomed to do when I cannot sleep?

"Oh, such an abominable nightmare! How shall I ever forget what I saw while I slept? For I was asleep, that is certain. I had lain down to get a little rest before running away; and I saw that woman's ghost in a dream. . . . A ghost? It must have been one, for only ghosts can enter through a bolted door; and her steps made so little noise as she crept over the floor that I scarcely heard the faintest rustling of her skirt.

"What had she come to do? By the glimmer of my night-light I saw her go round the table and walk up to my bed, cautiously, with her head lost in the darkness of the room. I was so frightened that I closed my eyes, in order that she might believe me to be asleep. But the feeling of her very presence and approach increased within me; and I was able clearly to follow all her doings. She stooped over me and looked at me for a long time, as though she did not know me and wanted to study my face. How was it that she did not hear the frantic beating of my heart? I could hear hers and also the regular movement of her breath. The agony I went through! Who was the woman? What was her object?

"She ceased her scrutiny and went away, but not very far. Through my eyelids I could half see her bending beside me, occupied in some silent task; and at last I became so certain that she was no longer watching me that I gradually yielded to the temptation to open my eyes. I wanted, if only for a second, to see her face and what she was doing.

"I looked; and Heaven only knows by what miracle I had the strength to keep back the cry that tried to force its way through my lips! The woman who stood there and whose features I was able to make out plainly by the light of the night-light was. . . .

"Ah, I can't write anything so blasphemous! If the woman had been beside me, kneeling down, praying, and I had seen a gentle face smiling through its tears, I should not have trembled before that unexpected vision of the dead. But this distorted, fierce, infernal expression, hideous with hatred and wickedness: no sight in the world could have filled me with greater terror. And it is perhaps for this reason, because the sight was so extravagant and unnatural, that I did not cry out and that I am now almost calm. At the moment when my eyes saw, I understood that I was the victim of a nightmare.

"Mother, mother, you never wore and you never can wear that expression. You were kind and gentle, were you not? You used to smile; and, if you were still alive, you would now be wearing that same kind and gentle look? Mother, darling, since the terrible night when Paul recognized your portrait, I have often been back to that room, to learn to know my mother's face, which I had forgotten: I was so young, mother, when you died! And, though I was sorry that the painter had given you a different expression from the one I should have liked to see, at least it was not the wicked and malignant expression of just now. Why should you hate me? I am your daughter. Father has often told me that we had the same smile, you and I, and also that your eyes would grow moist with tears when you looked at me. So you do not loathe me, do you? And I did dream, did I not?

"Or, at least, if I was not dreaming when I saw a woman in my room, I was dreaming when that woman seemed to me to have your face. It was a delirious hallucination, it must have been. I had looked at your portrait so long and thought of you so much that I gave the stranger the features which I knew; and it was she, not you, who bore that hateful expression.

"And so I sha'n't drink the water. What she poured into it must have been poison . . . or perhaps a powerful sleeping-drug which would make me helpless against the prince. . . . And I cannot but think of the woman who sometimes walks with him. . . .

"As for me, I know nothing, I understand nothing, my thoughts are whirling in my tired brain. . . .

"It will soon be three o'clock. . . . I am waiting for Rosalie. It is a quiet night. There is not a sound in the house or outside. . . .

"It is striking three. Ah, to be away from this! . . . To be free! . . ."

CHAPTER X
75 OR 155?

Paul Delroze anxiously turned the page, as though hoping that the plan of escape might have proved successful; and he received, as it were, a fresh shock of grief on reading the first lines, written the following morning, in an almost illegible hand:

"We were denounced, betrayed. . . . Twenty men were spying on our movements. . . . They fell upon us like brutes. . . . I am now locked up in the park lodge. A little lean-to beside it is serving as a prison for Jérôme and Rosalie. They are bound and gagged. I am free, but there are soldiers at the door. I can hear them speaking to one another.

"Twelve mid-day.

"It is very difficult for me to write to you, Paul. The sentry on duty opens the door and watches my every movement. They did not search me, so I was able to keep the leaves of my diary; and I write to you hurriedly, by scraps at a time, in a dark corner. . . .

"My diary! Shall you find it, Paul? Will you know all that has happened and what has become of me? If only they don't take it from me! . . .

"They have brought me bread and water! I am still separated from Rosalie and Jérôme. They have not given them anything to eat.

"Two o'clock.

"Rosalie has managed to get rid of her gag. She is now speaking to me in an undertone through the wall. She heard what the men who are guarding us said and she tells me that Prince Conrad left last night for Corvigny; that the French are approaching and that the soldiers here are very uneasy. Are they going to defend themselves, or will they fall back towards the frontier? . . . It was Major Hermann who prevented our escape. Rosalie says that we are done for. . . .

"Half-past two.

"Rosalie and I had to stop speaking. I have just asked her what she meant, why we should be done for. She maintains that Major Hermann is a devil:

"'Yes, devil,' she repeated. 'And, as he has special reasons for acting against you. . . .'

"'What reasons, Rosalie?'

"'I will explain later. But you may be sure that if Prince Conrad does not come back from Corvigny in time to save us, Major Hermann will seize the opportunity to have all three of us shot. . . .'"

Paul positively roared with rage when he saw the dreadful word set down in his poor Élisabeth's hand. It was on one of the last pages. After that there were only a few sentences written at random, across the paper, obviously in the dark, sentences that seemed breathless as the voice of one dying:

"The tocsin! . . . The wind carries the sound from Corvigny. . . . What can it mean? . . . The French troops? . . . Paul, Paul, perhaps you are with them! . . .

"Two soldiers came in, laughing:

"'Lady's kaput! . . . All three kaput! . . . Major Hermann said so: they're kaput!'

"I am alone again. . . . We are going to die. . . . But Rosalie wants to talk to me and daren't. . . .

"Five o'clock.

"The French artillery. . . . Shells bursting round the château. . . . Oh, if one of them could hit me! . . . I hear Rosalie's voice. . . . What has she to tell me? What secret has she discovered?

"Oh, horror! Oh, the vile truth! Rosalie has spoken. Dear God, I beseech Thee, give me time to write. . . . Paul, you could never imagine. . . . You must be told before I die. . . . Paul. . . ."

The rest of the page was torn out; and the following pages, to the end of the month, were blank. Had Élisabeth had the time and the strength to write down what Rosalie had revealed to her?

This was a question which Paul did not even ask himself. What cared he for those revelations and the darkness that once again and for good shrouded the truth which he could no longer hope to discover? What cared he for vengeance or Prince Conrad or Major Hermann or all those savages who tortured and slew women? Élisabeth was dead. She had, so to speak, died before his eyes. Nothing outside that fact was worth a thought or an effort. Faint and stupefied by a sudden fit of cowardice, his eyes still fixed on the diary in which his poor wife had jotted down the phases of the most cruel martyrdom imaginable, he felt an immense longing for death and oblivion steal slowly over him. Élisabeth was calling to him. Why go on fighting? Why not join her?