Landri was alone now. He could give free vent to the emotion that was suffocating him. Lying prone on the cushions of the carriage, he wept at last, and for a long, long while. All the tears that he had not shed during the day he shed now,--those that he had forced back in Valentine's presence, by an heroic effort of his will; those that he had forbade himself to display to the indifferent curiosity of the passers-by during his mad rush across Paris, and those that he had not let fall when he was talking with M. de Claviers, within two yards of the death-bed and later at the restaurant. And at the same time that his heart found relief in tears a reaction took place in his mind. For the first time since the dying man had begun to speak to him, he tried to doubt. "But she is my mother!" he sobbed. "And I believed that of her instantly! Instantly, without inquiry, without proof!" Inquiry! Alas! is there need of inquiry to make one believe what is visible, what is before one's eyes?--Proof?--But a fact is itself a proof, and the dying man was that evidence, that proof, that fact. His face, his movements, his voice returned to Landri's memory. As plainly as he saw the cushions of that commonplace compartment in their gray coverings, the lamp in the ceiling, and the nocturnal landscape flitting past the windows, he had seen a father die, bidding his son a despairing farewell. He had seen a woman's lover haunted, possessed, deluded by the memory of that woman. The dying man's outcries were not evidence: they were reality, unquestionable, undeniable,--the fact, the indestructible fact.--Doubt? No, Landri could not doubt. One by one he reviewed the details of that scene, which had been so short--as short as the time required to swallow a glass of poison, which, once it has passed into the veins, freezes the very well-spring of life. Among these details there was one, the threatening nature of which had not made itself manifest to him until that moment, adding a new terror to his agony. "The child shall have everything, everything," the sick man had groaned; and, addressing his imaginary enemies: "You sha'n't prevent that. I have found a way." Did these words mean that Jaubourg had left Landri his whole fortune by his will? It was not possible that that man, prudent as he was, and so intent upon concealing his paternity that he had forbidden himself ever to embrace his son, should have contradicted the whole tenor of his life, in cold blood, by such a step! Was the way that he had found, a gift through a third person?