He sighed so sorrowfully and so sincerely that the abominable idea which it had harbored fled from my mind. I thought only of what he was saying to me--of the sorrow of this man who seemed to have lost completely the woman whom he loved in the moment when the woman had found a son of whose existence the husband continued to be ignorant. In fact, he had in no way been able to understand the attitude of the Lady in Black as regards the facility with which she had detached herself from him--and he found no explanation for this cruel metamorphosis other than the love heightened by remorse of Professor Stangerson’s daughter for her father. “What good did it do me to kill him?” groaned M. Darzac. “Why did I fire the shot? Why did she impose upon me such a criminal, horrible silence if she did not intend to recompense me for it by her love? Did she fear arrest for me? Ah, no! Not even that, Sainclair, not even that! She fears only the agony of her father and the danger that he will succumb entirely under this new disgrace. Her father! Always her father! I do not exist for her. I have loved her for twenty years and when I believe at last that I have won her, the thought of her father takes my place.” And I said to myself: “The thought of her father--and of her child.” He seated himself on an old moss grown boulder by the chapel and said again, as if speaking to himself: “But I will snatch her away from this place--I cannot see her roaming about on the arm of her father--as if I were not in the world.” And, while he said this, I looked up and I fancied that I beheld the shadow of the father and the daughter passing and repassing in the dawn, beneath the sombre height of the Tower of the North, and I likened them in my mind to the old Oedipus and his daughter, Antigone, walking under the walls of Colone, dragging with them the weight of a grief beyond human endurance. And then suddenly, without my being able to recall myself to reason, perhaps because Darzac made again the gesture which had startled me before, the same frightful fancy assailed me, and I demanded: “How did it happen that the sack was empty?” He was not in the least confused or taken aback. He replied simply: “Rouletabille must tell us that.” Then he pressed my hand and wandered away through the undergrowth of the garden. I looked after him and said to myself: “I have gone mad!” CHAPTER XVI DISCOVERY OF “AUSTRALIA”