"Very well," he said, calmly. "Then suppose that she's alive, that she's been kidnapped or that she's in hiding. In any event, one fact is certain, which is that she is under twenty, consequently she's a minor and consequently she cannot administer her own property. From the legal point of view she exists only in the person of her natural representative, her guardian, who in this case happens to be her father." "And her father?" I asked, anxiously. "Is myself." He put on his hat, took it off again with a bow and said: "Théodore Massignac, forty-two years of age, a native of Toulouse, a commercial traveller in wines." It was a violent blow. The truth suddenly appeared to me in all its brutal nakedness. This man, this shady and wily individual, was Bérangère's father; and he had come in the name of the two accomplices, working in their interest and placing at their service the powers with which circumstances had favoured him. "Her father?" I murmured. "Can it be possible? Are you her father?" "Why, yes," he replied, with a fresh outburst of hilarity, "I'm the girl's daddy and, as such, the beneficiary, with the right to draw the profits for the next eighteen months, of Noël Dorgeroux's bequest. For eighteen months only! You can imagine that I'm itching to take possession of the estate, to complete the works and to prepare for the fourteenth of May an inauguration worthy in every respect of my old friend Dorgeroux." I felt the beads of perspiration trickling down my forehead. He had spoken the words which were expected and foretold. He was the man of whom public opinion had said: "When the time comes, some one will emerge from the darkness." CHAPTER IX THE MAN WHO EMERGED FROM THE DARKNESS "When the time comes," they had said, "some one will emerge from the darkness. When the time comes, some one will remove the mask from his face." That face now beamed expansively before me. That some one, who was about to play the game of the two accomplices, was Bérangère's father. And the same question continued to suggest itself, each time more painfully than the last: "What had been Bérangère's part in the horrible tragedy?" There was a long, heavy silence between us. I began to stride across the room and stopped near the chimney, where a dying fire was smouldering. Thence I could see Massignac in a mirror, without his perceiving it; and his face, in repose, surprised me by a gloomy expression which was not unknown to me. I had probably seen some photograph of him in Bérangère's possession. "It's curious," I said, "that your daughter should not have written to you." I had turned round very briskly; nevertheless he had had time to expand his mouth and to resume his smile: