If Alfred had probed his own motives he would have recognized the fact that the sympathy he had formerly felt for this clever and pleasing youth was not the real cause of the temptation that led him irresistibly to go to his house this very morning in spite of the unusual hour. It was nearly noon. "I hope I will find him." A thought that was not inspired merely by a friendly feeling. The real cause was that Raymond belonged to the most select class. To Alfred, who had no idea of the air-tight partitions that divide the different circles of the various nobilities, this meant that his comrade certainly knew the Duchesse d'Ivrea, or had heard her spoken of by people who knew her. If any one could give him exact information about her it was Contay, and Alfred Boyer felt that he must have this information. He hungered and thirsted for it, as much as if, instead of being the simple posthumous secretary to the marshal Prince of Augsbourg, the blood of this hero coursed in his own veins, and he had a right to know who bore this title of d'Ivrea, won at the cannon's mouth on the battlefield. Besides, the will stipulated that the Duchess should figure in the "Mémoires" as the donor of the letters to Moreau, and was not his own honor involved in these "Mémoires"? Had he not devoted two precious years of his youth to them? Was he not ready to devote a third, with this recompense as his supreme ambition, that his name as a poor scribbler should one day be linked forever with that of the mighty warrior of the "Grande Armée"? What if this woman, however, who bought a place in the book with the gift of her fortune, had made herself unworthy of the honor by some infamous action? Was such a thing possible? No. The master of Combes professed such a passionate reverence for his grandfather! That her name should be cited in the "Mémoires," that the Prince should conduct the funeral, that she should be given a place in the tomb of the Frédets--never would he admit it, even for a moment, and even at the price of millions, that these three things could be granted to a person unworthy. But the Prince had not destroyed the will--then he must have seen some possibility of conforming to it! Yet his sadness and disgust, the tone of voice in which he had spoken of _her_, as he put it, his first movement, his subsequent silence--how were all these contradictory indications to be reconciled? Alfred hastened his steps toward the sole chance of learning the whole truth with a feverish impatience that amounted almost to pain....