Whenever Victoria sufficiently surmounted her grief to consider the interests of the country, she applauded herself on having succeeded in deciding Captain Marion to accept the eminent post of which he daily proved himself more worthy. She wrote several times to Tetrik in that sense. He had left the government of Gascony in order to retire with his son, then about twenty years of age, to a house that he owned near Bordeaux, and where, as he said, he sought in poetry whatever solace he could find for the death of Victorin and his son. He composed several odes on those cruel events. Nothing, indeed, could be more touching than an ode written by Tetrik on the subject of "The Two Victorins," and sent by him to Victoria. Accordingly, the letters that he addressed to her during the two months of Marion's administration were marked with profound sadness. They expressed in a manner at once so simple, so delicate and so tender the affection he entertained for her family, and the sorrow that her bereavement caused him, that my foster-sister's attachment for her relative increased by the day. Even I shared the blind confidence that she reposed in him, and forgot the suspicions that were twice awakened in my mind against the man. Moreover, my suspicions vanished before the answer made to me by Eustace, when I questioned him regarding the soldier, my mysterious traveling companion and perpetrator of the assassination of Victoria's grandson. "Commissioned by Captain Marion to provide him with a reliable man for your escort," Eustace answered me, "I picked out a horseman named Bertal. He was ordered to wait for you at the city gate. After nightfall I left the advanced post of the camp contrary to orders and went secretly into the city. I was on my way thither when I met the soldier on horseback. He was riding along the bank of the river, and was on the way to meet you. I told him to say nothing of having met me, should he run across any of our comrades on the road. He promised secrecy, and I went my way. Early the next morning, as I was returning along the river bank from Mayence, where I spent part of the night, I saw Bertal running towards me. He was on foot; he was fleeing distractedly before the just rage of our comrades. When I learned from his own mouth the horrible crime that he even dared to glory in, I killed him on the spot. That is all I know of the wretch." So far from the information clearing up, it obscured still more the mystery that brooded over that fatal night. The Bohemian girls had disappeared; and all inquiries set on foot regarding Bertal, my traveling companion and subsequent perpetrator of such a horrible deed as the murder of a child, agreed in representing the man as a brave and honest soldier, incapable of the monstrous deed imputed to him, and explainable only on the theory of drunkenness or insane fury.