He consulted her look; her eye was burning, her voice broken, and she
repeated: "Go--go! Do you not understand me?"

He obeyed, went to the laboratory, taking the bracelet with him. After
five minutes he returned saying: "I am very unskilful; I crushed the lid
in raising it; but you wished it, and your curiosity will be satisfied."

She could, in truth, satisfy her curiosity. She eagerly seized the
bracelet, and on the back of the plate, now left bare, she saw engraved
in the gold, characters almost microscopic in size. Through the greatest
attention she succeeded in deciphering them. She distinguished several
dates, marking the year, the month, and the day, when some important
event had occurred to the Princess Gulof. These dates, accompanied by
no indication of any kind, formerly sufficed to recall the principal
experiments that she had practised on mankind before having discovered
Samuel Brohl. The result had not been very cheerful, for beneath this
form of calendar stood a confession of faith, thus expressed, "Vanity
of vanities, all is vanity!" This melancholy declaration was signed,
and the signature was perfectly legible. Mlle. Moriaz spelled it
out readily, although at that moment her sight was dim, and she was
convinced that the trinket, which Count Larinski had presented to her as
a family relic, had belonged to Anna Petrovna, Princess Gulof.

She grew mortally pale, and lost consciousness; she seemed on the verge
of an attack of delirium. In the agitation of her mind, she imagined
that she saw herself at a great distance, at the end of the world, and
very small; she was climbing a mountain, on the other side of which
there was a man awaiting her. She questioned herself, "Am I, or is this
traveller, Mlle. Moriaz?" She closed her eyes, and saw a blank abyss
open before her, in which her life was ingulfed, whirled about, like the
leaf of a tree in a whirlpool.

M. Langis drew near her, and, lightly slapping the palms of her hands,
said, "What is the matter?"

She roused herself, made an effort to lift her head, and let it sink
again. The trouble that lay in the depths of her heart choked her;
she experienced an irresistible need of confiding in some one, and she
judged that the man who was talking to her was one of those men to whom
a woman can tell her secret, one of those souls to whom she could
pour out her shame without blushing. She began, in a broken voice,
a confused, disconnected recital that Camill