on Luis, when they had left the
mayor's. "Here we have Fauville writing his letters to a dead man--and to
a dead man, by the way, who looks to me very much as if he had been
murdered."

"Some one must have intercepted the letters."

"Obviously. But that does not do away with the fact that he wrote them to
a dead man and made his confidences to a dead man and told him of his
wife's criminal intentions."

Mazeroux was silent. He, too, seemed greatly perplexed.

They spent part of the afternoon in asking about old Langernault's
habits, hoping to receive some useful clue from the people who had known
him. But their efforts led to nothing.

At six o'clock, as they were about to start, Don Luis found that the car
had run out of petrol and sent Mazeroux in a trap to the outskirts of
Alencon to fetch some. He employed the delay in going to look at the Old
Castle outside the village.

He had to follow a hedged road leading to an open space, planted with
lime trees, where a massive wooden gate stood in the middle of a wall.
The gate was locked. Don Luis walked along the wall, which was, in fact,
very high and presented no opening. Nevertheless, he managed to climb
over by means of the branches of a tree.

The park consisted of unkept lawns, overgrown with large wild flowers,
and grass-covered avenues leading on the right to a distant mound,
thickly dotted with ruins, and, on the left, to a small, tumbledown house
with ill-fitting shutters.

He was turning in this direction, when he was much surprised to perceive
fresh footprints on a border which had been soaked with the recent rain.
And he could see that these footprints had been made by a woman's boots,
a pair of elegant and dainty boots.

"Who the devil comes walking here?" he thought.

He found more footprints a little farther, on another border which the
owner of the boots had crossed, and they led him away from the house,
toward a series of clumps of trees where he saw them twice more. Then he
lost sight of them for good.

He was standing near a large, half-ruined barn, built against a very tall
bank. Its worm-eaten doors seemed merely balanced on their hinges. He
went up and looked through a crack in the wood. Inside the windowless
barn was in semi-darkness, for but little light came through the openings
stopped up with straw, especially as the day was beginning to wane. He
was able to distinguish a heap of barrels, broken wine-presses, old
ploughs, and scrap