The daylight found Lupin seated beside the dead woman, remembering and thinking, while his lips, from time to time, uttered the disconsolate syllables: "Dolores! . . . Dolores! . . ." He had to act, however, and, in the disorder of his ideas, he did not know how to act nor with what act to begin: "I must close her eyes first," he said. The eyes, all empty, filled only with death, those beautiful gold-spangled eyes, had still the melancholy softness that gave them their charm. Was it possible that those eyes were the eyes of a monster? In spite of himself and in the face of the implacable reality, Lupin was not yet able to blend into one single being those two creatures whose images remained so distinct at the back of his brain. He stooped swiftly, lowered the long, silky eyelids, and covered the poor distorted face with a veil. Then it seemed to him that Dolores was farther away and that the man in black was really there, this time, in his dark clothes, in his murderer's disguise. He now ventured to touch her, to feel in her clothes. In an inside pocket were two pocket-books. He took one of them and opened it. He found first a letter signed by Steinweg, the old German. It contained the following lines: "Should I die before being able to reveal the terrible secret, let it be known that the murderer of my friend Kesselbach is his wife, whose real name is Dolores de Malreich, sister to Altenheim and sister to Isilda. "The initials L. and M. relate to her. Kesselbach never, in their private life, called his wife Dolores, which is the name of sorrow, but Letitia, which denotes joy. L. M.--Letitia de Malreich--were the initials inscribed on all the presents which he used to give her, for instance, on the cigarette-case which was found at the Palace Hotel and which belonged to Mrs. Kesselbach. She had contracted the smoking-habit on her travels. "Letitia! She was indeed the joy of his life for four years, four years of lies and hypocrisy, in which she prepared the death of the man who loved her so well and who trusted her so whole-heartedly. "Perhaps I ought to have spoken at once. I had not the courage, in memory of my old friend Kesselbach, whose name she bore. "And then I was afraid. . . . On the day when I unmasked her, at the Palais de Justice, I read my doom in her eyes. "Will my weakness save me?" "Him also," thought Lupin, "him also she killed! . . . Why, of course, he knew too much! . . . The initials . . . that name, Letitia . . . the secret habit of smoking!" And he remembered the previous night, that smell of tobacco in her room.