He kept watching the hotel. At three o’clock the girl came out of it, wearing an air of considerable agitation and kept looking behind her as if she was afraid lest some one should come out immediately after her and spy upon her. Was it her confederate, William, whom she distrusted? She hurried, still looking behind her to the post office where she scribbled a telegram, which she had to begin three times, with feverish haste. After she had left the post office Ralph entered it and managed to possess himself of one of the crumpled up forms. He read: Hotel Miramare, Luz, Hautes-Pyrenees. Shall arrive to-morrow first train. Tell them All. “What the devil is she going to do among the mountains at this time of year?” he murmured to himself. “‘Tell them all’—Does that mean that her people live at Luz?” He resumed his cautious watch on her and saw her enter the stage door of the Municipal Theater, doubtless to take part in a rehearsal of the company. For the rest of the day he watched the exits from the theater. But she did not stir out of it. As for her confederate William, he remained invisible. In the evening Ralph slipped into the back of a box at the theater: and the moment the girl with the green eyes appeared on the stage he could hardly repress a cry of surprise: she was taking the part of Veronique. “Leonide Balli. So that’s her name?” he said to himself. “She sings in light opera in the provinces?” He could not get over it. The fact was so different from everything he had imagined about the girl with the green eyes. Provincial or Parisienne, she showed herself an uncommonly clever comedienne and a most adorable singer, simple, with no straining for effect, moving, full of tenderness and gayety, of modesty and charm. She had all the gifts and all the graces, plenty of cleverness; and a lack of experience of the stage which was a further charm. He recalled his first impression on the Boulevard Haussmann and his fancy that the young girl, whose mask was at the same time so tragic and so childlike, had a double destiny. Ralph passed three delightful hours. He could not tire of admiring the strange creature whom he had only seen, since the charming initial vision, by flashes, in crises of fear and horror. This was another woman in whom everything seemed lightness and harmony. Yet it was indeed she who had murdered and played a part in infamies and crimes. It was indeed the confederate of William! Of these two so different images which was he to consider the true one? He watched her in the hope to learn, and watched in vain, for a third woman overlay the other two and united them in an intense and moving life, the life of Veronique. Only a few gestures a little too nervous, a few phrases badly delivered, displayed to the eyes of the man who knew the truth, the woman under the heroine, and revealed a state of mind which insensibly weakened her rendering of the part.