I see you now, and those eyes which revealed your stainless but sorely wounded heart. You come to me, and you pardon me; your hand strokes my check with that sad, sad caress which you gave me before you went away into the darkness, where hands may no more be clasped or tears mingled. If death had not come to you too quickly, if I had obeyed your last desire, you would have carried the secret of your most painful doubts to the grave. You do not blame me now for having wanted to know? You no longer blame me for having suffered? A destiny exists, and weighs upon us, which requires that light shall be cast upon the darkness of that crime, that justice shall resume its rights, and the avenger come. By what road? That power knows, and uses strange weapons for its task of reparation. It was decreed, dear and pious sister of my murdered father, that your faithful cherishing of his dear memory should at last arouse my slumbering will. Reproach me not, O tender, unquiet spirit, with the torments which I have inflicted upon myself, with the tragic purpose to which I have sacrificed my youth. Rest, I say, rest! May peace descend upon the grave in which you sleep beside my father, in the cemetery at Compiègne, where I too shall find repose one day. And to think that to-morrow might be that day! IX My aunt died at nine o'clock in the evening. I closed her eyes, and sat by her side until eleven, when Julie came to me and persuaded me to go downstairs and eat something. I had taken nothing but a cup of coffee at noon. What a mournful meal was that in the dining-room, with its walls adorned with old china plates, where I had so often sat opposite to my dear aunt! A lamp stood on the table and threw a light upon the table-cloth just in front of me, but did not dispel the shadows in the room, which was warmed by a big earthenware stove, cracked by the heat. I listened to the noise of this stove, and it brought back the evenings in my childhood, when I used to roast chestnuts in the ashes of just such a fire, after I had split them, lest they should burst. I looked at Julie, who insisted on waiting upon me herself, and found her drying the big tears that rolled down her wrinkled cheeks with the corner of her blue apron. I have passed hours that were more cruel, but have never known any more poignant; and I may do myself the justice to record that grief absorbed every other feeling in me at first. During the whole of that dismal night I never for an instant thought of opening the packet of letters which I had obtained by so shameful a falsehood. I had forgotten its existence, although I had taken care to pick it up and take it to my own room. Where was now my curiosity to learn the secrets of those letters? I knew that I had just lost for ever the only being who had loved me entirely, and that knowledge crushed me. I wished to keep the watch by the side of the dead for part of the night, and I