already knew so well; the solicitude of the dear old woman for me, her dread of possible danger to me, her terrible anxiety on her death-bed. She dwelt upon my aunt's inconsolable regret for my mother's second marriage, and her unconquerable dislike to M. Termonde. "Each time that she made up her mind to go to your mother's house," said Julie, "for your sake, André, she was ill from agitation beforehand, and sunk in melancholy for a full week after she came back." These particulars were not new to me, I had known them long before, but in my present mood they threw me back upon my cruel suspicions. I resumed the analysis of my thoughts concerning M. Termonde from another point of view. Granted that he is guilty, I argued, is there a single fact since the event which is not made clear by his culpability? My aunt's horror is, moreover, an indication that I am not a madman, for she entertained suspicions similar to my own. But she also suspected my mother, otherwise she would have stedfastly opposed a marriage which she must have regarded as a frightful sacrilege. Yes; but she may have been mistaken about my mother, and right with respect to my stepfather. Is not M. Termonde's antipathy to me also a sign? Has there not always been something more in this than the not-uncommon antagonism between stepfather and stepson? Is not that "something more" bitter detestation of one who recalls his victim at every turn, sickening aversion to the presence of the son of the murdered man? Again, I considered the capricious humours of the man, his alternate craving for excitement and for solitude, and the fits of silence and brooding to which my mother told me he was subject. Hitherto I had explained these freaks by attributing them to the liver complaint which had hollowed out his cheeks, darkened his eyelids, and from time to time stretched hint on his bed in such paroxysms of pain that the strong man cried aloud. But these oddities, this malady itself, might not they be the effect of that obscure but undeniable phenomenon which assumes such strange and various shapes--remorse? Did I not know by experience the close relation between the moral and the physical in man, the ravages which a fixed idea makes in one's health, the killing and irresistible power of thought. I, who could not go through strong emotion of any kind without being attacked by neuralgia? Once more, suspicion took hold of me. How wretched is he whom such dreadful doubts assail! Tossed upon a troubled sea, the sick and weary mind knows no repose. XI