Love is not blind, it confers the brightest and clearest vision to the person it possesses. Hellier knew quite well, knew for a certainty, that, till this cloud was cleared from her father’s name, Cécile Lefarge would never marry. She was the daughter of an assassin. He was quite prepared to forget the fact. She could never do so. It was a penalty laid upon her by fate and she would not palter with the fact, and unless her father’s name was, by some miracle, cleared, she would go to her grave as she was, upheld by that iron determination which women alone possess when the passions are concerned and which is at once the most beautiful and the most terrible trait in women. And the thing was hopeless, for M. Lefarge’s name could never be cleared, so Hellier told himself, as he sat gloomily over the fire in his sitting-room at Clifford’s Inn. During his research in Paris he had come across several facts in connexion with the case that struck him especially. One was that the head of the murdered man, Müller, had never been recovered. Another was of a different nature. In a copy of the Petit Journal, dated some weeks after the day upon which the Lefarge tragedy had occurred, he had come across the details of a murder committed in the neighbourhood of Montmartre. The victim was an old man named Mesnier; he had been killed in a most brutal manner and for no object apparently. Mesnier lived in the Rue d’Antibes, a squalid street near the Moulin Rouge. A man had been seen leaving his room and, as Mesnier had no visitors as a rule, and the man had been seen leaving the room within a very short time after the assassination occurred, the man was presumably the criminal. Alphonse Karr, the witness, an ex-waiter of the Théâtre-Concert Européen of Montmartre, said that he would have sworn that this man was Wilhelm Müller, whom he had often seen at the _chat noir_, only for the fact that he knew that Müller was dead. This paragraph greatly interested Hellier and he searched on through the files of the _Petit Journal_ in hopes of finding more details of the case. He found none. But he found a headline that interested him in a copy of the _Petit Journal_, dated some days after the murder of Mesnier. It ran: “Another motiveless murder.” It related to the murder of a woman named Sabatier, who had been found strangled in a field near Paris. There was no possible motive for the crime, the woman had a purse in her hand containing twenty-five francs. The purse had not been taken, no violence had been done to her, if we except the fact that she had been strangled as though by some violent maniac.