From the park there came the powerful aroma of dead leaves. It is infinitely sad! One breathes it in, in the way one listens to a funeral hymn. Crows passed cawing, as they caw when they fly in great numbers from a steeple. The approach of evening darkened the day. I examined the room; for I felt I must look anywhere but at the dead. Over the writing-desk was a drawing in chalk, which represented my Aunt Lidivine, smiling. It is wrong to make portraits smile! They are destined to see too many sad things, just as Lidivine, in colors, having smiled to see her husband carrying on his illicit amours, smiled again, in the tragic presence of his remains. The picture was twenty years old, but the chalk powder, which resembles the dust of age, made it look more time-worn. Every day made it darker. It seemed to remove, far away into the past my aunt and her own youth. It displeased me. I endeavored to interest myself in other things--in the falling dusk--in the early bats--in the knickknacks of the room--in the candles which threw a feeble light with their dancing flames. The wind rose, and took off my attention for the moment. It streamed moaning through the leafage, and as one heard it groaning in the chimney, one fancied one could hear the passage of Time. With a sudden stronger gust, it put out a candle. The other flickered, and I shut the window quickly. Suddenly, I was sincere with myself, and no longer sought to be my own dupe. I required to look at the dead man, to keep an eye on his seeming powerlessness; then I lit the lamp and placed Lerne in a flood of light. Really, he was handsome--very handsome! Nothing remained of the grim physiognomy which I had encountered, after fifteen years of absence--nothing! except, perhaps, a certain irony on the mouth--the shade of a grin. Had my late uncle still some _arrière pensée_? Dead, he seemed still to be defying Nature. Dead! he who in his lifetime had set his finger to creation! And his work appeared to me in all the sublime audacity and criminal boldness, which made him worthy of the pillory, as well as of the pedestal, of the rod of the slave and of the palm of the victor. Of yore, I knew he was worthy of honor, and I would have taken my oath that he would never have deserved dishonor; but what astounding chance, some five years ago, had befallen, which had made of him the wicked lord of a castle who murdered his guests? I kept asking myself this, and meanwhile the shades of Klotz and Macbeth seemed to be crying out their torture in the recesses of the moaning chimney.