be
suffocating. Emotion! The sight of me recalled to him the long agony of
that night when he thought that he was about to die without parting with
me for the last time.

"'For what I have to tell thee'----

"He shook his head.

"'It is the secret of my life!'

"He was lying on a sort of sick chair or lounge, in the library where he
passed his last days with his books. He made me sit down beside him. He
took my hand and said:

"'I am going to die. I believed that the end had come last night. I
called thee. Oh, well, if I had died there is one being in the world who
would not have had the fortune which--I have'----

"He lowered his voice as if he thought we were spied upon, as if some
one could hear.

"'I have a daughter. Yes, even from thee I have hidden this secret,
which tortures me. A daughter who loves me and who has not the right to
confess this tenderness, no more than I have the right to give her my
name. Ah! our youth, sad youth! I might have had a home to-day, a
fireside of my own, a dear one near me, and instead of that, an
affection of which I am ashamed and which I have hidden even from thee,
Jacques, from thee, dost thou comprehend?'

"I remember each of Rovere's words as if I was hearing them now. This
conversation with my poor friend is among the most poignant yet most
precious of my remembrances. With much emotion, which distressed me, the
poor man revealed to me the secret which he had believed it his duty to
hide from me so many years, and I vowed to him--I swore to him on my
honor, and that is why I hesitated to speak, or rather refused to speak,
not wishing to compromise any one, neither the dead nor living--I swore
to him, Monsieur le Juge, to repeat nothing of what he told me to any
one, to any one but to her"----

"Her?" interrogated M. Ginory.

"His daughter," Dantin replied.

The Examining Magistrate recalled that visitor in black, who had been
seen occasionally at Rovere's apartments, and the little romance of
which Paul Rodier had written in his paper--the romance of the Woman in
Black!

"And this daughter?"

"She bears," said Dantin, with a discouraged gesture, "the name of the
father which the law gives her, and this name is a great name, an
illustrious name, that of a retired general officer, living in one of
the provinces, a widower, and who adores the girl who is another man's
child. The mother is dead. The father has never known. When dying, the
mother revealed the se