t the telegrams but
the correspondence--the first thing that caught my eye was the name
of Haldin. Mr. de P---'s death was no longer an actuality, but the
enterprising correspondent was proud of having ferreted out some
unofficial information about that fact of modern history. He had got
hold of Haldin's name, and had picked up the story of the midnight
arrest in the street. But the sensation from a journalistic point of
view was already well in the past. He did not allot to it more than
twenty lines out of a full column. It was quite enough to give me a
sleepless night. I perceived that it would have been a sort of treason
to let Miss Haldin come without preparation upon that journalistic
discovery which would infallibly be reproduced on the morrow by French
and Swiss newspapers. I had a very bad time of it till the morning,
wakeful with nervous worry and night-marish with the feeling of
being mixed up with something theatrical and morbidly affected. The
incongruity of such a complication in those two women's lives was
sensible to me all night in the form of absolute anguish. It seemed due
to their refined simplicity that it should remain concealed from them
for ever. Arriving at an unconscionably early hour at the door of their
apartment, I felt as if I were about to commit an act of vandalism....

The middle-aged servant woman led me into the drawing-room where there
was a duster on a chair and a broom leaning against the centre table.
The motes danced in the sunshine; I regretted I had not written a letter
instead of coming myself, and was thankful for the brightness of the
day. Miss Haldin in a plain black dress came lightly out of her mother's
room with a fixed uncertain smile on her lips.

I pulled the paper out of my pocket. I did not imagine that a number
of the _Standard_ could have the effect of Medusa's head. Her face went
stony in a moment--her eyes--her limbs. The most terrible thing was that
being stony she remained alive. One was conscious of her palpitating
heart. I hope she forgave me the delay of my clumsy circumlocution. It
was not very prolonged; she could not have kept so still from head to
foot for more than a second or two; and then I heard her draw a breath.
As if the shock had paralysed her moral resistance, and affected the
firmness of her muscles, the contours of her face seemed to have given
way. She was frightfully altered. She looked aged--ruined. But only for
a moment. She said with deci