She thrust these aside. I recognized Bérangère. She raised her passionate eyes to mine, flung her arms round my neck and gave me her lips, while she stammered words of love. And in this way I learnt, without any need of explanation, that Massignac's insinuations against his daughter were false, that she was the terror-stricken victim of the two scoundrels and that she had never ceased to love me. CHAPTER XVII SUPREME VISIONS The exhibition of the following day was preceded by two important pieces of news which appeared in the evening papers. A group of financiers had offered Théodore Massignac the sum of ten million francs in consideration of Noël Dorgeroux's secret and the right to work the amphitheatre. Théodore Massignac was to give them his answer next day. But, at the last moment, a telegram from the south of France announced that the maid-of-all-work who had nursed Massignac in his house at Toulouse, a few weeks before, now declared that her master's illness was feigned and that Massignac had left the house on several occasions, each time carefully concealing his absence from all the neighbours. Now one of these absences synchronized with the murder of Noël Dorgeroux. The woman's accusation therefore obliged the authorities to reopen an enquiry which had already elicited so much presumptive evidence of Théodore Massignac's guilt. The upshot of these two pieces of news was that my uncle Dorgeroux's secret depended on chance, that it would be saved by an immediate purchase or lost for ever by Massignac's arrest. This alternative added still further to the anxious curiosity of the spectators, many of whom correctly believed that they were witnessing the last of the Meudon exhibitions. They discussed the articles in the papers and the proofs or objections accumulated for or against the theory. They said that Prévotelle, to whom Massignac was refusing admission to the amphitheatre, was preparing a whole series of experiments with the intention of proving the absolute accuracy of his theory, the simplest of which experiments consisted in erecting a scaffolding outside the Yard and setting up an intervening obstacle to intercept the rays that passed from Venus to the screen. I myself who, since the previous day, had thought of nothing but Bérangère, whom I had pursued in vain through the crowd amid which she had succeeded in escaping me, I myself was smitten with the fever and that day abandoned the attempt to discover upon the close-packed tiers of seats the mysterious girl whom I had held to me all quivering, happy to abandon herself for a few moments to a kiss on which she bestowed all the fervour of her incomprehensible soul. I forgot her. The screen alone counted, to my mind. The problem of my life was swallowed up in the great riddle which those solemn minutes in the history of mankind set before us.