Suddenly an ax smote the trunk with a sound as of low thunder. The poplar quivered, twisted about, and my uncle gave a start. His cup dropping from his hand, was dashed to pieces on the floor, and whilst his cheeks regained their color, he put his hand down quickly to his ankles, as if the ax had struck the man and the tree at the same blow. Meanwhile, Lerne gradually recovered. I pretended to have observed nothing except his fainting, and I told him that he should look after himself--that those repeated fits would end by killing him. Did he know what caused them? My uncle gave a sign that he did. Emma came near his chair.... “I know,” said he, at last, “cardiac _syncope_. I am treating myself.” That was not true. The Professor was not treating himself. He was using up his life in the pursuit of his chimera, without more heed for his skin than it if had been an old work-jacket, to be thrown away as soon as the task was over. Emma advised him to go out. “The air will do you good,” she said. He went out. We saw him going towards the poplar, smoking his pipe. The blows of the ax fell faster and faster. The tree bent over and fell. Its fall made the sound like an earthquake. The branches hit my uncle but he did not step aside. And now, robbed of its only _campanile_, Fonval seemed to have sunk lower than ever into the depths of the valley, and I sought, in the forlorn sky, to fix the place of the tree, which one had already forgotten, and its tall form, which was already legendary. Lerne came back. He did not seem to know that he had been imprudent. His carelessness made one tremble when one realized that he might be as reckless in the most hazardous experiments--for example, those transfusions of soul about which the note-book spoke. Was it one of those attempts which I had just witnessed? I meditated about it, with that strange feeling which I had already experienced at Fonval, like that caused by groping about in mysterious darkness. Were Lerne’s fainting-fit and the tragedy of the tree some mysterious coincidence, or had some strange bond united them at the moment of the ax’s blow? Certainly the arrival of the woodcutters at the foot of the poplar would have been enough to cause the flight of the birds, and as for the shuddering, why should the cutter not have produced it by climbing up the other side of the trunk in order to fix the traditional rope? Once more, the crossways of probability offered me a choice of solutions, like so many roads, but my mind was not acute at the time. * * * * * I was often with Emma, but as much as I loved those meetings, I had to make up my mind to stop them, for the following unanswerable reason--but for the note-book I might have attributed it to my nervous condition; I should then have called it a pathological consequence of the operations, and Lerne would have fooled me to the end--fortunately I guessed his tactics at the first.