ence?"

"If it interests you, we will open it before you."

"My God! My God!" she gasped. "Where have you found this correspondence?
Where? Tell me where!"

"I will tell you. `At the villa, in his chamber. We forced the lock of
his bureau."

She seemed to breathe again, but her father took her brutally by the
arm.

"Come, Natacha, you are going to tell us what that man was doing here
to-night."

"In her chamber!" cried Matrena Petrovna.

Natacha turned toward Matrena:

"What do you believe, then? Tell me now."

"And I, what ought I to believe?" muttered Feodor. "You have not told
me yet. You did not know that man had relations with my enemies. You are
innocent of that, perhaps. I wish to think so. I wish it, in the name
of Heaven I wish it. But why did you receive him? Why? Why did you bring
him in here, as a robber or as a..."

"Oh, papa, you know that I love Boris, that I love him with all my
heart, and that I would never belong to anyone but him."

"Then, then, then.--speak!"

The young girl had reached the crisis.

"Ah, Father, Father, do not question me! You, you above all, do not
question me now. I can say nothing! There is nothing I can tell
you. Excepting that I am sure--sure, you understand--that Michael
Nikolaievitch did not come here last night."

"He did come," insisted Rouletabille in a slightly troubled voice.

"He came here with poison. He came here to poison your father, Natacha,"
moaned Matrena Petrovna, who twined her hands in gestures of sincere and
naive tragedy.

"And I," replied the daughter of Feodor ardently, with an accent
of conviction which made everyone there vibrate, and particularly
Rouletabille, "and I, I tell you it was not he, that it was not he, that
it could not possibly be he. I swear to you it was another, another."

"But then, this other, did you let him in as well?" said Koupriane.

"Ah, yes, yes. It was I. It was I. It was I who left the window and
blinds open. Yes, it is I who did that. But I did not wait for the
other, the other who came to assassinate. As to Michael Nikolaievitch,
I swear to you, my father, by all that is most sacred in heaven and
on earth, that he could not have committed the crime that you say. And
now--kill me, for there is nothing more I can say."

"The poison," replied Koupriane coldly, "the poison that he poured into
the general's potion was that arsenate of soda which was on the grapes
the Marshal of the Court brought here. Those