Suddenly, an atrocious idea seized me. I bent down over the dead man, and succeeded in getting the mud off his head. Nothing abnormal in front. His hair was closely cropped, but behind, encircling the whole occiput, like Macbeth’s scar, from one temple to the other, a horrible cut laid bare the broken brain. * * * * * Lerne had killed Klotz! He had suppressed him because of Emma, in the same way that he knocked the life out of animals and fowls, when he had exhausted their power of enduring his experiments. It was a surgical crime. I now imagined I had probed the mystery to the bottom. I thought to myself, “Macbeth’s madness comes from this, that Lerne missed his blow. The poor doomed creature saw a dreadful death coming on him. But why should my uncle have missed him? Perhaps in his blind fury, he suddenly saw clear, and feared reprisals from the Macbeth family.” As for Klotz, he was an orphan and a bachelor, as Emma assured me, so there he is! and the same fate awaits me--awaits her, perhaps, if we are found together! “Oh, to flee, to flee, she and I together, to flee, it’s the only reasonable plan, and opportunity favors us! Will it ever occur again?” We must make for the station, through the forest, in order to avoid Lerne and Karl, who are coming by the road. But the labyrinth!--Perhaps it would be better to use the motor-car and pass over their bodies. I do not know, we shall see! Shall I be in time? Quick, for God’s sake, quick! I ran panting, striving to outstrip the light, swift, unseen feet of Death. I ran, twice falling and twice picking myself up, and gasping with the fear of that Pursuer. The _château_! No Lerne yet! His felt hat was not hanging on its usual peg in the hall. I had won the first lap. The second was to get us away, without return. I dashed up the staircase, crossed the landing, went through the dressing-room at a bound, and burst into Emma’s room. “Let us begone,” I blurted out. “Come, sweetheart, come, I will explain all. There is murder being done at Fonval!” “What’s the matter? What is it?” She remained rigid in the presence of my excitement, standing stiffly up. “How white you are. Don’t be afraid.” Then, and then only, I perceived that terror possessed her, and that with frightened eyes, and bloodless lips, her poor dead face was signing to me to be silent, and announcing the imminence of a great danger, close at hand, too close for her to be able to warn me of it with a gesture or a sound, without the watchful enemy taking revenge upon her. And yet, nothing happened. I took in the whole peaceful chamber at a glance. Everything in it seemed to me mysterious. The air itself was a hostile fluid--an unbreathable ocean in which I was sinking. I felt a terror of what might happen behind me. I waited some legendary apparition. And it was more terrible, this apparition, than the sudden appearance of Mephistopheles. _For it was Lerne calmly coming out of a wardrobe!_