“This is the story, briefly,” she began. “My father, who was my mother’s cousin, died before my birth, leaving my mother a fair income to which was added an allowance which came from my grandfather d’Asteux. My mother’s father, an excellent man, an artist and inventor, was always in search of discoveries and great secrets, always traveling on miraculous business which was to bring us an immense fortune. I knew him very well. I can see myself sitting on his knee and hear him staying to me: ‘My little Aurelie will be very rich. It is for her I am working.’ Then, when I was just six years old, he wrote to my mother and begged her to join him, bringing me with her, without letting any one know anything about it. One night we took the train and went to him and stayed two days. At the moment of starting on our return journey, my mother said to me in his presence: “‘Aurelie, never tell any one where you have been the last two days, neither what you have done nor what you have seen. It is a secret which henceforth belongs to you as well as to us, a secret which will give you a great fortune when you are twenty.’ “‘A very great fortune,’ said my grandfather. ‘Therefore swear to us never to speak of these things to any one, whatever happens.’ “‘To no one, except the man you love and of whom you are as sure as you are of yourself,’ my mother amended. “I made the promise they demanded of me. I was very much moved by their earnestness, and I cried. “A few months later my mother married Bregeac. It was an unhappy marriage and did not last long. During the course of the next year she died of pneumonia after having secretly given me a sheet of paper on which was set out all the information about the district we had visited and what I was to do when I was twenty. A little while later my grandfather also died, and I remained alone with my step-father, Bregeac, who got rid of me as soon as he could by sending me to this convent at Sainte-Marie. I came to it very unhappy and sad, but I was upheld by the importance this keeping a secret gave me in my own eyes. Then one Sunday I looked for an out-of-the-way place and came here, up to this terrace, to carry out a plan my childish brain had formed. I knew by heart the information given me by my mother. What good was it to keep a document which all the world would know if I did not get rid of it. I burnt it in this vase.” Ralph nodded his head and said: “And you have forgotten all the information it contained?” “Yes,” she said. “As the days passed, without my perceiving it, all that information was effaced from my mind by my absorption in the friendships, the work, and the play I found here. I have forgotten the name of the district, what part of the country it is in, the line which took us to it, and things I was to do—everything.” “Absolutely everything?” he asked.