"She's asleep, don't let us disturb her. She has had a bad shock and will take some time to recover." Lupin poured himself out a glass of water and drank it down. Then he took a chair and, calmly: "Pooh! She'll be all right by to-morrow." "What do you say?" "I say that she'll be all right by to-morrow." "Why?" "In the first place, because it did not strike me that Mlle. Darcieux felt any very great affection for her father." "Never mind! Think of it: a father who tries to kill his daughter! A father who, for months on end, repeats his monstrous attempt four, five, six times over again!... Well, isn't that enough to blight a less sensitive soul than Jeanne's for good and all? What a hateful memory!" "She will forget." "One does not forget such a thing as that." "She will forget, doctor, and for a very simple reason...." "Explain yourself!" "She is not M. Darcieux's daughter!" "Eh?" "I repeat, she is not that villain's daughter." "What do you mean? M. Darcieux...." "M. Darcieux is only her step-father. She had just been born when her father, her real father, died. Jeanne's mother then married a cousin of her husband's, a man bearing the same name, and she died within a year of her second wedding. She left Jeanne in M. Darcieux's charge. He first took her abroad and then bought this country-house; and, as nobody knew him in the neighbourhood, he represented the child as being his daughter. She herself did not know the truth about her birth." The doctor sat confounded. He asked: "Are you sure of your facts?" "I spent my day in the town-halls of the Paris municipalities. I searched the registers, I interviewed two solicitors, I have seen all the documents. There is no doubt possible." "But that does not explain the crime, or rather the series of crimes." "Yes, it does," declared Lupin. "And, from the start, from the first hour when I meddled in this business, some words which Mlle. Darcieux used made me suspect that direction which my investigations must take. 'I was not quite five years old when my mother died,' she said. 'That was sixteen years ago.' Mlle. Darcieux, therefore, was nearly twenty-one, that is to say, she was on the verge of attaining her majority. I at once saw that this was an important detail. The day on which you reach your majority is the day on which your accounts are rendered. What was the financial position of Mlle. Darcieux, who was her mother's natural heiress? Of course, I did not think of the father for a second. To begin with, one can't imagine a thing like that; and then the farce which M. Darcieux was playing ... helpless, bedridden, ill...." "Really ill," interrupted the doctor.