The sleeping girl started up, and at the same moment the vial, which in her horror Marie had flung from her hand, fell beside her, on the pillow. Le Prun was first confounded and speechless--then furious. He broke the glass that contained the medicine, and pursuing the girl to the further end of the room, seemed on the point of wreaking his fury upon her. He restrained himself, however, and having demanded the vial repeatedly in vain, went to his own room. The next day the physician did not attend, and in the dead of night the house was entered by thieves, some valuables were stolen, and Mademoiselle Marie Guadin was found murdered in her bed in the morning. The occurrence made a great _eclat_, and suspicions, from the taint of which he had never quite recovered, began to environ Monsieur Le Prun. His unhappy wife was now put under the severest restraint--from which, and, as was supposed, the partial effects of the poison, she became subject to temporary fits of insanity. By sheer terror, Le Prun extorted from her a written declaration, to the effect that she lived with him merely as his mistress, and that no marriage ceremony, or any contract of marriage, had ever been performed between them. It was about three months after these terrible occurrences that she gave birth to a male child. This child, it appeared, was removed after a few weeks from its mother, and placed in the care of a poor woman in the village of Charrebourg, where, under the name of Gabriel, he, as we know, lived unrecognized, and himself unsuspecting his origin. His mother had been a heartless, as she was a vicious and a miserable woman. Instead of the yearnings of maternal love, she regarded her innocent child merely as the offspring of that monster, whom she execrated and feared with a preternatural hate. If she looked upon him with any feeling more lively than that of indifference, it was with one of positive malice and antipathy.