often thought of it, I have even raised my
arm to strike him, but what would have been the good? He must have taken
his precautions. The paper would remain. And then there is no revenge
in killing a man... My hatred went further than that... It demanded his
ruin, his downfall; and, to achieve that, there was but one way: to cut
his claws. Daubrecq, deprived of the document that gives him his immense
power, ceases to exist. It means immediate bankruptcy and disaster...
under the most wretched conditions. That is what I have sought."

"But Daubrecq must have been aware of your intentions?"

"Certainly. And, I assure you, those were strange meetings of ours: I
watching him closely, trying to guess his secret behind his actions and
his words, and he... he..."

"And he," said Lupin, finishing Clarisse's thought, "lying in wait for
the prey which he desires... for the woman whom he has never ceased to
love... whom he loves... and whom he covets with all his might and with
all his furious passion..."

She lowered her head and said, simply:

"Yes."

A strange duel indeed was that which brought face to face those two
beings separated by so many implacable things! How unbridled must
Daubrecq's passion be for him to risk that perpetual threat of death and
to introduce to the privacy of his house this woman whose life he had
shattered! But also how absolutely safe he must feel himself!

"And your search ended... how?" asked Lupin.

"My search," she replied, "long remained without fruit. You know the
methods of investigation which you have followed and which the police
have followed on their side. Well, I myself employed them, years before
either of you did, and in vain. I was beginning to despair. Then, one
day, when I had gone to see Daubrecq in his villa at Enghien, I picked
up under his writing-table a letter which he had begun to write,
crumpled up and thrown into the waste-paper-basket. It consisted of
a few lines in bad English; and I was able to read this: 'Empty
the crystal within, so as to leave a void which it is impossible to
suspect.' Perhaps I should not have attached to this sentence all the
importance which it deserved, if Daubrecq, who was out in the garden,
had not come running in and begun to turn out the waste-paper-basket,
with an eagerness which was very significant. He gave me a suspicious
look: 'There was a letter there,' he said. I pretended not to
understand. He did not insist, but his agitation d