Termonde is guilty. He was, he is still passionate to the point of violence; that is the first fact. He was madly in love with my mother; that is a second fact. My father was painfully jealous of him; that was a third fact. Here begins the uncertainty! Was M. Termonde aware of that jealousy? Had he and my father had some of those silent scenes, after which a man of the world is aware that the house of his friend, to whose wife he is making love, is about to be closed to him? This supposition would, I thought, be admitted without any difficulty. It was less easy to understand the transition from that point to the fierce longing to be rid of an obstacle which is felt to be for ever invincible; but yet the thing is possible. At this stage of my analysis, I came in contact with what I called the physical data of the crime. The false Rochdale existed; this again was a fact. He had been seen by certain persons, who had also heard him speak. He was waiting in a room at the Imperial Hotel, while M. Termonde was at our table talking with us. For M. Termonde to be guilty of the crime, it would be necessary to establish a complicity between the two men; one of them, the false Rochdale, must needs have been an instrument, a bravo hired to kill, for the advantage of the other. The exceptional character of this fresh hypothesis was too evident for me to yield to it immediately; indeed, the first time the idea occurred to me, I ridiculed myself mercilessly. I remembered my childish terror and the many proofs I had had of my readiness and ingenuity in confounding the imaginary with the real. How like my former self I still was, how incapable of chasing away the phantoms which suddenly appeared before me! In vain did I urge this upon myself, because it was no more than an improbability that the false Rochdale should be bribed by M. Termonde to murder my father; it was not an absolute impossibility. The least reflection shows that in the matter of crime everything happens. I then set to work to recall all the extraordinary stories of the Cour d'Assises which I could remember. My imagination turned blood-colour, like the horizon where the sun was setting. I reentered the house, I dined, as I had breakfasted, all alone, and then I passed the evening in the salon, silting where my mother had sat. So afraid was I of thought that I asked Julie to rejoin me after her supper. The old woman settled herself on a low Breton chair, in a corner of the hearth, and went on with her knitting. Her needles flashed as they moved in and out amid the brown wool of which she was fabricating a stocking, and her spectacles gleamed in the firelight. Sometimes she worked on the whole evening without uttering a word, with Boule-de-Poil, her favourite, purring at her feet, and Pierrot, who was of a jealous disposition, rubbing his head against her, and standing on his hind paws. At other times she talked, answering my questions about my aunt. She repeated what I