It was at Papon-Laroche's establishment also that he had first met Salvan, now Director of the Training College, who, observing his bent, had approved of the course he took in yielding to it completely, and becoming what he was to-day--a humble elementary schoolmaster who, convinced of the noble usefulness of his duties, was happy to discharge them even in a small and lonely village. Marc's affection for those whose narrow and slumbering minds required awakening and expansion had decided his career. And, in the discharge of his modest functions, his passion for truth increased, becoming a more and more imperious craving. It ended indeed by constituting the _ratio_ of his health, his very life, for it was only by satisfying it that he enjoyed normal life. When it escaped him, he fell into anguish of spirit, consumed by his desire to acquire and possess it wholly, in order that he might communicate it to others, failing which he spent his days in intolerable suffering, often physical as well as mental. From this passion assuredly sprang the torment which kept Marc awake that night by the side of his sleeping wife. He suffered from his ignorance, his failure to penetrate the truth respecting the murder of that child. He was not confronted merely by an ignoble crime; he divined behind it the existence of dark and threatening depths, some dim but yawning abyss. Would his sufferings continue then as long as he should not know the truth, which perchance he might never know? for the shadows seemed to increase at each effort that he made to dissipate them. Mastered by uncertainty and fear, he ended by longing for daybreak, in order that he might resume his investigations. But his wife laughed lightly in her sleep; some happy dream, no doubt, had come to her; and then the terrible old grandmother seemed to rise up before the young man's eyes, and repeat that he must on no account meddle in that horrible affair. At this the certainty of a conflict with his wife's relations appeared to him, and brought his hesitation and unhappiness to a climax.