me carefully."

Thereupon, at each successive step, he warned the other what he ought to
do, guiding him along in his obliging way without the faintest tremor in
his voice.

"Don't let go of me, turn to the left.--Now we merely have to go
straight ahead.--Only, wait a moment, a barrier intersects the
gallery, and there is a gate.--There we are! I'm opening the gate, you
hear?--Follow me, I'll go first."

Morange quietly stepped into the void, amid the darkness. And, without
a cry, he fell. Alexandre who was close in the rear, almost touching him
so as not to lose him, certainly detected the void and the gust which
followed the fall, as with sudden horror the flooring failed beneath
them; but force of motion carried him on, he stepped forward in his
turn, howled and likewise fell, head over heels. Both were smashed
below, both killed at once. True, Morange still breathed for a few
seconds. Alexandre, for his part, lay with his skull broken to pieces
and his brains scattered on the very spot where Blaise had been picked
up.

Horrible was the stupefaction when those bodies were found there. Nobody
could explain the catastrophe. Morange carried off his secret, the
reason for that savage act of justice which he had accomplished
according to the chance suggestions of his dementia. Perhaps he had
wished to punish Constance, perhaps he had desired to repair the old
wrong: Denis long since stricken in the person of his brother, and now
saved for the sake of his daughter Hortense, who would live happily with
Margot, the pretty doll who was so good. By suppressing the criminal
instrument the old accountant had indeed averted the possibility of a
fresh crime. Swayed by his fixed idea, however, he had doubtless never
reasoned that cataclysmic deed of justice, which was above reason,
and which passed by with the impassive savagery of a death-dealing
hurricane.

At the works there was but one opinion, Morange had assuredly been mad;
and he alone could have caused the accident, particularly as it was
impossible to account, otherwise than by an act of madness, for the
extinguishing of the lights, the opening of the balustrade-door, and
the plunge into the cavity which he knew to be there, and into which
had followed him the unfortunate young man his companion. Moreover, the
accountant's madness was no longer doubted by anybody a few days later,
when the doorkeeper of his house related his final eccentricities, and
a commissary of