When I think this out for a little while, remembering how it was she, the woman whom he so loved, who put the effectual clue for which I had ceased to hope into my hand, and that it led to the certainty from which there was no drawing back, a vertigo of terror seizes upon me, as though the awful breath of destiny swept over my brow. Yes, I am terrified, because I too have blood upon my hands; but at the same time it comforts me because I can say to myself that I have but been the instrument of an inevitable deed, the necessary slave of an invisible master. Poor mother! If you had known? You also were the deadly weapon in the hand of fate, blind, like the knife that kills and knows it not. Whereas I--I have seen, I have known, I have willed. Ah! Until now I have been strong enough to keep the compact made with myself, that I would confess my story simply, detail by detail, passing no judgment on myself. And now, as the scene approaches which determined the new and last period of the drama of my life, my spirit shrinks. Coward! Once more I yield to a kind of stupefaction at the thought that it is really my own story I am setting down, that thus I acted, that there is in my memory----No, I have pledged my word; I will go on. Yes, with this hand that holds my pen I have done the deed. Yes, I have blood, blood, an indelible stain upon these fingers. They falter, but they must needs obey me and write out the story to its end. XIV At the beginning of the summer, six months after my aunt's death, I was in exactly the same position with respect to my stepfather as on that already distant day when, maddened with suspicion by my father's letters, I entered his study, to play the part of the physician who examines a man's body, searching with his finger for the tender spot that is probably a symptom of a hidden abscess. I was full of intuitions now, just as I was at the moment when he passed me in his carriage with his terrible face, but I did not grasp a single certainty. Would I have persisted in a struggle in which I felt beforehand that I must be beaten? I cannot tell; for, when I no longer expected any solution to the problem set before me for my grief, a grief, too, that was both sterile and mortal, a day came on which I had a conversation with my mother so startling and appalling that to this hour my heart stands still when I think of it. I have spoken of never-to-be-forgotten dates; among them is the 25th of May, 1879.