ountenance bore a woeful look.

"A great misfortune has happened during the night, monsieur," said he.

"What is it?"

"Somebody has stolen the whole of monsieur's furniture, all, everything,
even to the smallest articles."

This news pleased me. Why? Who knows? I was complete master of myself,
bent on dissimulating, on telling no one of anything I had seen;
determined on concealing and in burying in my heart of hearts, a
terrible secret. I responded:

"They must then be the same people who have stolen my keys. The police
must be informed immediately. I am going to get up, and I will rejoin you
in a few moments."

The investigation into the circumstances under which the robbery might
have been committed lasted for five months. Nothing was found, not
even the smallest of my knick-knacks, nor the least trace of the
thieves. Good gracious! If I had only told them what I knew.... If I
had said ... I had been locked up--I, not the thieves--and that I was
the only person who had seen everything from the first.

Yes I but I knew how to keep silence. I shall never refurnish my house.
That were indeed useless. The same thing would happen again. I had no
desire even to re-enter the house, and I did not re-enter it; I never
visited it again. I went to Paris, to the hotel, and I consulted doctors
in regard to the condition of my nerves, which had disquieted me a good
deal ever since that fatal night.

They advised me to travel, and I followed their council.

II

I began by making an excursion into Italy. The sunshine did me much good.
During six months I wandered about from Genoa to Venice, from Venice to
Florence, from Florence to Rome, from Rome to Naples. Then I traveled
over Sicily, a country celebrated for its scenery and its monuments,
relics left by the Greeks and the Normans. I passed over into Africa,
I traversed at my ease that immense desert, yellow and tranquil, in which
the camels, the gazelles, and the Arab vagabonds, roam about, where, in
the rare and transparent atmosphere, there hovers no vague hauntings,
where there is never any night, but always day.

I returned to France by Marseilles, and in spite of all the Provencal
gaiety, the diminished clearness of the sky made me sad. I experienced,
in returning to the continent, the peculiar sensation, of an illness
which I believed had been cured, and a dull pain which predicted that
the seeds of the disease had not been eradicated.

I then returned to