He did not move, clinging to the enemy's throat, as if his stiffened fingers were no longer able to release their grip. Besides, although he now _knew_, he had not, so to speak, the exact feeling that it was Dolores. It was still the man in black, Louis de Malreich, the foul brute of the darkness; and that brute he held and did not mean to let go. But the truth rushed upon the attack of his mind and of his consciousness; and, conquered, tortured with anguish, he muttered: "Oh, Dolores! . . . Dolores! . . ." He at once saw the excuse: it was madness. She was mad. The sister of Altenheim and Isilda, the daughter of the last of the Malreichs, of the demented mother, of the drunken father, was herself mad. A strange madwoman, mad with every appearance of sanity, but mad nevertheless, unbalanced, brain-sick, unnatural, truly monstrous. That he most certainly understood! It was homicidal madness. Under the obsession of an object toward which she was drawn automatically, she killed, thirsting for blood, unconsciously, infernally. She killed because she wanted something, she killed in self-defence, she killed because she had killed before. But she killed also and especially for the sake of killing. Murder satisfied sudden and irresistible appetites that arose in her. At certain seconds in her life, in certain circumstances, face to face with this or that being who had suddenly become the foe, her arm had to strike. And she struck, drunk with rage, ferociously, frenziedly. A strange madwoman, not answerable for her murders, and yet so lucid in her blindness, so logical in her mental derangement, so intelligent in her absurdity! What skill, what perseverance, what cunning contrivances, at once abominable and admirable! And Lupin, in a rapid view, with prodigious keenness of outlook, saw the long array of bloodthirsty adventures and guessed the mysterious paths which Dolores had pursued. He saw her obsessed and possessed by her husband's scheme, a scheme which she evidently understood only in part. He saw her, on her side, looking for that same Pierre Leduc whom her husband was seeking, looking for him in order to marry him and to return, as queen, to that little realm of Veldenz from which her parents had been ignominiously driven. And he saw her at the Palace Hotel, in the room of her brother, Altenheim, at the time when she was supposed to be at Monte Carlo. He saw her, for days together, spying upon her husband, creeping along the walls, one with the darkness, undistinguishable and unseen in her shadowy disguise. And, one night, she found Mr. Kesselbach fastened up . . . and she stabbed him. And, in the morning, when on the point of being denounced by the floor-waiter . . . she stabbed him. And, an hour later, when on the point of being denounced by Chapman, she dragged him to her brother's room . . . and stabbed him. All this pitilessly, savagely, with diabolical skill.