But I afterwards learnt that the telegram had perplexed him quite as much as it perplexed me. A great success? What could it be? He racked his mind in vain. He reviewed all the phases and aspects of the Dreyfus case, wondering whether this or that had happened, but not suspecting the public revelations which were then impending, the tragedy which was being enacted. For a while he walked up and down, feverish and anxious (he was at the time in poor health), and then he would fling himself on a sofa, still and ever indulging in his surmises. With that kind of prescience which he had so frequently displayed in the Dreyfus affair, he felt certain that something very important had occurred, for otherwise such a mysterious telegram would never have been sent him. This lasted the whole evening. My daughter Violette was with him at the time, and his feverishness doubtless gained on her. At last she retired to rest, while M. Zola, according to his wont, carried a lamp into his own room to sit there a while and read some French newspapers which had reached him, via Wareham, by the evening delivery. There was nothing in them of a nature to explain the mysterious telegram; still he read on and on in the hope, as it were, of quieting himself. It was, I believe, between eleven o'clock and midnight when he rose to go to bed, and as he did so he heard some loud exclamations, followed by a cry. At first he fancied that the calls came from one of the servants' rooms, and he paused on the landing. Then, however, as they were repeated, he found that they came from my daughter's apartment. With fatherly solicitude he waited and listened. Violette was calling in her sleep. Practical enough in matters of everyday life, this girl of mine has literary partialities of a somewhat gruesome kind, and her avowed ambition (I quote her own words) is to write, some day, stories full of witches and wizards, that shall make people's flesh creep. For this reason I keep such of Anne Radcliffe's uncanny novels as I possess carefully locked up. I can well remember my daughter telling me at times of strange things dreamt by her in her sleep; but not of being of a romantic or a mystical turn myself, I have usually pooh-poohed all this as nonsense. And such I believe is the course which fathers usually adopt if their daughters' imaginations begin to run riot. As for M. Zola, when he heard Violette calling in her sleep, his first impulse was to rouse her, but all suddenly became still again. The girl had probably sunk into a more peaceful slumber. And so, after waiting a few minutes longer, he thought it best to leave her as she was. Nothing further disturbed M. Zola that night; but on the following morning, when he met Violette downstairs, he asked her how she felt, and told her that he had heard her calling in her sleep. He had probably formed the same opinion as I should have formed under the circumstances, namely, that it was a case of indigestion or a little excitement.