asses that you are, couldn't you
leave me alone? Oh, I swear to Heaven--!"

With a blow of his left fist he knocked the ticket collector down; with a
blow of his right he sent Mazeroux spinning; and shaking off the porters
and the station-master, he rushed along the platform to the luggage-room,
where he took flying leaps over several batches of trunks, packing-cases,
and portmanteaux.

"Oh, the perfect fool!" he mumbled, on seeing that Mazeroux had let the
power down in the car. "Trust him, if there's any blunder going!"

Don Luis had driven his car at a fine rate during the day; but that night
the pace became vertiginous. A very meteor flashed through the suburbs of
Le Mans and hurled itself along the highroad. Perenna had but one thought
in his head: to reach the next station, which was Chartres, before the
two accomplices, and to fly at Sauverand's throat. He saw nothing but
that: the savage grip of his two hands that would set Florence
Levasseur's lover gasping in his agony.

"Her lover! Her lover!" he muttered, gnashing his teeth. "Why, of course,
that explains everything! They have combined against their accomplice,
Marie Fauville; and it is she alone, poor devil, who will pay for the
horrible series of crimes!"

"Is she their accomplice even?" he wondered. "Who knows? Who knows if
that pair of demons are not capable, after killing Hippolyte and his son,
of having plotted the ruin of Marie Fauville, the last obstacle that
stood between them and the Mornington inheritance? Doesn't everything
point to that conclusion? Didn't I find the list of dates in a book
belonging to Florence? Don't the facts prove that the letters were
communicated by Florence?...

"Those letters accuse Gaston Sauverand as well. But how does that affect
things? He no longer loves Marie, but Florence. And Florence loves him.
She is his accomplice, his counsellor, the woman who will live by his
side and benefit by his fortune.... True, she sometimes pretends to be
defending Marie Fauville. Play-acting! Or perhaps remorse, fright at the
thought of all that she has done against her rival, and of the fate that
awaits the unhappy woman!

"But she is in love with Sauverand. And she continues to carry on the
struggle without pity and without respite. And that is why she wanted to
kill me, the interloper whose insight she dreaded. And she hates me and
loathes me--"

To the hum of the engine and the sighing of the trees, which bent down at
th