"I have also asked myself the same question, but it is a mystery which resists every attempt I can make to solve it. While travelling we were accompanied but by three persons, an old servant who brought me up, a young female received into the family by Madame de Hansfeld from motives of compassion, and my _chasseur_, who also acted as courier, and had been a very long while in my service. To suspect my worthy old Frantz or a young girl of seventeen years of age would be preposterous; there is no one left, then, who could by probability have committed the crime but the _chasseur_. Now, though a most excellent and devoted servant, the unfortunate fellow is so extremely stupid and slow of imagination that it is even more impossible it could have been he than either Frantz or the young companion of my wife." "Still, so great a persistance in these murderous attempts proves----" "Stay, my worthy friend; the unjust suspicions I have already entertained have cost me too dear, and occasioned too much grief to myself and others for me to venture again to affix blame to any one except on certain grounds." "But these attacks speak with a startling reality; there is no mistaking their import; and what if they are repeated?" "I shall rejoice if it be so; that which yesterday I dreaded and sought to avoid, to-day I desire and court." "Ah, Monsieur Arnold! if your life is valueless to yourself, do you owe nothing to the friends who would survive to lament your loss? And you do not intend making any efforts to discover the vile perpetrators of this shameful machination?" "None whatever! why should I? am I not now here to say, _Farewell for ever?_" And with these words M. de Hansfeld quitted the room in a state of mind bordering on desperation. CHAPTER XXXVI THE RENDEZVOUS The morning arrived on which M. de Brévannes was to meet Madame de Hansfeld in the Jardin des Plantes. He went there at eleven o'clock. The perusal of the black book--this mysterious confidant of the most intimate thoughts of Paula--had given Bertha's husband almost hopes: the secrets he believed he had surprised were thus summed up:-- "Madame de Hansfeld reproached herself for not hating M. de Brévannes, the murderer of Raphael, sufficiently." "The prince made her so unhappy that she desired his death." Iris had particularly desired M. de Brévannes not to give the princess the slightest hint of his being in possession of her most secret thoughts. This counsel served De Brévannes' plans too well for him not to follow it scrupulously. Madame de Hansfeld came to this interview with less feeling of security than M. de Brévannes, whom she knew to be capable of spreading the most unworthy calumnies; and the effect of these calumnies might be very terrible, and reach De Morville.