"Then it must have been while you were away . . ." "You don't mean that! Oh, how M. Dorgeroux will scold me!" "But who is the gentleman?" "Upon my word, I couldn't tell you. . . . My sight is so bad. . . ." "Do you know him?" "No, I didn't recognize his voice." "And did they both go out, Bérangère and he?" "Yes, they crossed the road . . . opposite." Opposite meant the path in the wood. I thought for a second or two; and then, tearing a sheet of paper from my note-book, I wrote: "MY DEAR UNCLE, "Wait for me, when you come back, and don't leave the Lodge on any account. The danger is imminent. "VICTORIEN." "Give this to M. Dorgeroux as soon as you see him, Valentine. I shall be back in half an hour." The path ran in a straight line through dense thickets with tiny leaves burgeoning on the twigs of the bushes. It had rained heavily during the last few days, but a bright spring sun was drying the ground and I could distinguish no trace of footsteps. After walking three hundred yards, however, I met a small boy of the neighbourhood, whom I knew by sight, coming back to the village and pushing his bicycle, which had burst a tyre. "You don't happen to have seen Mlle. Bérangère, have you?" I asked. "Yes," he said, "with a gentleman." "A gentleman wearing glasses?" "Yes, a tall chap, with a big beard." "Are they far away?" "When I saw them, they were a mile and a quarter from here. I turned back later . . . they had taken the old road . . . the one that goes to the left." I quickened my pace, greatly excited, for I was conscious of an increasing dread. I reached the old road. But, a little farther on, it brought me to an open space crossed by a number of paths. Which was I to take? Feeling more and more anxious, I called out: "Bérangère! . . . Bérangère!" Presently I heard the hum of an engine and the sound of a motor-car getting under way. It must have been five hundred yards from where I was. I turned down a path in which, almost at once, I saw footsteps very clearly marked in the mud, the footsteps of a man and of a woman. These led me to the entrance of a cemetery which had not been used for over twenty years and which, standing on the boundary of two parishes, had become the subject of claims, counterclaims and litigation generally. I made my way in. The tall grass had been trampled down along two lines which skirted the wall, passed before the remnants of what had once been the keeper's cottage, joined around the kerb of a cistern fitted up as a well and were next continued to the wall of a half-demolished little mortuary chapel. Between the cistern and the chapel the soil had been trodden several times over. Beyond the chapel there was only one track of footsteps, those of a man. I confess that just then my legs gave way beneath me, although there was no trace of a definite idea in my mind. I examined the inside of the chapel and then walked round it.