"Your mother and my father loved each other," he repeated. "I should say they must have belonged to that class of rather enthusiastic lovers whose passion indulges in charming little childish ways, for they had a trick of calling each other, when alone, by names which nobody else used to them; and they selected their second Christian names, which were also yours and mine. One day your mother dropped her amethyst rosary. The largest of the beads broke in two pieces. My father had one of the pieces mounted as a trinket which he hung on his watch-chain. Both were widowed. You were two years old and I was eight. In order to devote himself altogether to the woman he loved, my father sent me to England and bought the lodge in which your mother, who lived in the big house next door, used to go and see him, crossing the lane and using the same key for both doors. It was no doubt in this lodge, or in the garden round it, that they were murdered. We shall find that out, because there must be visible proofs of the murder, proofs which Siméon Diodokis discovered, since he was not afraid to say so in the inscription on the tombstone." "And who was the murderer?" Coralie asked, under her breath. "You suspect it, Coralie, as I do. The hated name comes to your mind, even though we have no grounds for speaking with certainty." "Essarès!" she cried, in anguish. "Most probably." She hid her face in her hands: "No, no, it is impossible. It is impossible that I should have been the wife of the man who killed my mother." "You bore his name, but you were never his wife. You told him so the evening before his death, in my presence. Let us say nothing that we are unable to say positively; but all the same let us remember that he was your evil genius. Remember also that Siméon, my father's friend and executor, the man who bought the lovers' lodge, the man who swore upon their tomb to avenge them: remember that Siméon, a few months after your mother's death, persuaded Essarès to engage him as caretaker of the estate, became his secretary and gradually made his way into Essarès' life. His only object must have been to carry out a plan of revenge." "There has been no revenge."