hypotheses, however improbable, I had no right to draw back, I was bound to push my suspicions to their extreme. "If I were to go to M. Massol," I reflected, "to place this correspondence in his hands and to consult him, would he regard that revelation of our life, of the feelings of the victim and of those of my mother's second husband, as a document to be neglected?" No--a thousand times no--so strongly was I convinced of this, that I would not have dared to take the letters to him. I should have been afraid to set the bloodhounds of justice on this track. He and I had pondered and studied so long that crucial question--who could possibly have had an interest in the crime? If he had thought of my stepfather, he had never spoken of him. What indication did he possess which could have authorised him for a moment to raise so great a disturbance in my mind? None; but I could now furnish him with such an indication, and my instinct told me that it was very grave, and of formidable significance. How could I have prevented myself from fastening upon it, turning it over and over in my mind, and abandoning myself completely to its absorbing suggestions? A strange contrast existed between the tempest within my breast and the profound quiet of the house of the dead. My life glided on in apparent monotony; but in reality it was one of torment and perplexity. I rose late and took my breakfast alone, always waited on by Julie. I had, however, as companions in the silent room, Don Juan, the watch-dog, and two half-bred Angora cats, given by me to my aunt long ago, and named respectively, Boule-de-Poil and Pierrot. I fed these creatures, each in its turn, reminding myself of Robinson Crusoe, the beloved hero of my childhood, and the scenes in which the solitary man is described as sitting at his table surrounded by his private menagerie. The cats hissed when Don Juan came near them, and if I neglected them they put out their claws and tore the table-cloth, poking their prying little noses up at me. The old clock ticked solemnly, as it had done for more years than I knew of, and there I sat, amid these homely surroundings, discussing with myself the arguments for and against my stepfather's guilt. I put the matter to myself thus: "The great objection to be made to an inquiry is the established alibi; the alibi attaches to the physical data of the crime, and in every analysis of this kind the series of moral data exists alongside of the series of physical data. If these do not coincide, there is room for doubt, and the chief care of a clever assassin is to create that doubt. If the appearance of material impossibility were to prevent investigation, how many 'instructions' would be abandoned?" When these thoughts pressed upon me too heavily, I rose and walked towards the wood. Around me spread the vast silence of the afternoon in winter. The dry leaves crackled under my feet, while my mind still toiled over the argument for and against. Granted that M.