As he spoke the Elementary Inspector drew up his little figure, and his words fell from his lips with increasing severity. In a formal way he had shaken hands with Marc, knowing that Le Barazer, the Academy Inspector, his superior, was partial to the young man. But he looked at him askance through his glasses as if to invite him to withdraw. And Marc could not linger, although it worried him to leave Simon alone with that man, on whom his position depended, and before whom he now trembled--he who had shown so much courage ever since the morning. But there was no help for it; so Marc went home full of the new impression that had come to him, the covert hostility of that man Mauraisin, whom he divined to be a traitor. The evening, spent with the ladies, proved very quiet. Neither Madame Duparque nor Madame Berthereau referred to the crime, and the little house fell asleep peacefully, as if nought of the tragedy in progress elsewhere had ever entered it. Marc had thought it prudent to say nothing about his busy afternoon. On going to bed he contented himself with telling his wife that he felt quite at ease with reference to his friend Simon. The news pleased Geneviève; and they then continued chatting until rather late, for in the daytime they were never alone together, never able to speak freely, in such wise that they seemed to be strangers. When they fell asleep in each other's arms, it was as if they had been blissfully reunited after a positive separation. But, in the morning, Marc was painfully astonished to find an abominable article against Simon in _Le Petit Beaumontais_. He remembered the paragraph of the previous day which had expressed so much sympathy with the schoolmaster and had covered him with praise. Twenty-four hours had sufficed to effect a complete change, and now, with a wonderful show of perfidious suppositions and false interpretations of the facts, the Jew was savagely sacrificed, plainly accused of the ignoble crime. What could have happened then? What powerful influence could have been at work? Whence came that poisoned article, drafted so carefully in order that the Jew might be for ever condemned by the ignorant populace athirst for falsehood? That newspaper melodrama with its mysterious intricacies, its extraordinary fairy-tale improbabilities, would prove, Marc felt it, a legend changing into truth, positive truth, from which people henceforth would refuse to depart. And when the young man had finished his perusal he again became conscious of some secret working in the gloom, some immense work which mysterious forces had been accomplishing since the previous day in order to ruin the innocent and thereby save the unknown culprit.