It was, however, quite another thing with regard to my stepfather. When suspicion is awakened upon a point of such tragic interest as the murder of a father, that suspicion cannot be lulled to sleep again, without having touched, handled, grasped a certainty. I had grasped this certainty, at the moment when I clasped my mother in my arms, and heard her speak; but, did my mother's innocence prove that of my stepfather also? No sooner was I alone, and free to study the fatal letters, in minute detail this time, than the new aspect of the problem presented itself to my mind. Except in those moments when he was driven into injustice by excess of pain, my father had always distinguished between the responsibility of his wife and that of his friend, in the relation that excited his jealousy. In his thoughts he had always acquitted my mother; but, on the other hand, he had never treated Termonde's passion for her as doubtful. There, then, was the positive, undeniable fact, of which I had been ignorant until I read the letters--this man had an immense interest in the "suppression" of my father. Before I read the letters I was free to believe that his feelings towards my mother were not awakened until she was free to marry him. Notwithstanding my jealousy, I had never denied that it was most natural for a young, beautiful, and grief-stricken woman to inspire a passionate desire to console her, easily transformed into love, in even the most intimate friend of her dead husband. Things now appeared to me in a different light. In the solitude of the house at Compiègne, where I lingered on instead of returning to Paris, professedly in order to regulate some affairs, but in reality because I was like the wounded animals who creep away to endure their pain, I read those letters over and over again. One relic in particular, among all those in the house, aroused the desire for vengeance and for justice that had been so strong in my childhood. This was a calendar, one of those from which one tears off a leaf daily, that lay beside the blotting-book formerly belonging to my father and already mentioned, on a small bureau in his old room, now mine. The calendar was for the year 1864, and my aunt had kept it, untouched, at the date of the day that had brought her the terrible news of the murder. Saturday, the 11th of June, was the day marked by the leaf which lay uppermost upon the bulk of the others, and those others marked the days of that year, days which my father never saw. The 11th of June, 1864! It was then, on Thursday, the 9th, that he had been killed. I was nine years old at that time, I was now twenty-four, and his death was still unavenged. Why? Because chance had not furnished me with any indication; because I had not been able to form any hypothesis resting upon a fact that was observed, verified, certain. Now that I had laid hold of one of those indications, however doubtful, one of those