y
wrote me word that my daughter's health was failing,--eight months
afterwards that she was dead, and they sent the register of her decease.
At this time Madame Seraphin had entered the service of Jacques Ferrand,
after having given our daughter over to the Chouette, through the medium
of a wretch who is now at the galleys at Rochefort. I was writing down
all this when the Chouette stabbed me. This paper is there also, with a
portrait of our daughter when four years of age. Examine all,--letters,
declaration, portrait,--and you who have seen her, the unhappy child,
will judge--"

These words exhausted Sarah, and she fell fainting into her armchair.

Rodolph was thunderstruck at this disclosure. There are misfortunes so
unforeseen, so horrible, that we try not to believe them until the
overwhelming evidence compels us. Rodolph, persuaded of the death of
Fleur-de-Marie, had but one hope,--that of convincing himself that she
was not his daughter. With a frightful calmness that alarmed Sarah, he
approached the table, opened the casket, and began to read the letters,
examining with scrupulous attention the papers which accompanied them.

These letters, bearing the postmark, and dated, written to Sarah and her
brother by the notary and Madame Seraphin, related to the infancy of
Fleur-de-Marie, and the investment of the money destined for her.
Rodolph could not doubt the authenticity of this correspondence.

The Chouette's declaration was confirmed by the particulars collected at
Rodolph's desire, in which a felon named Pierre Tournemine, then at
Rochefort, was described as the individual who had received
Fleur-de-Marie from the hands of Madame Seraphin, for the purpose of
giving her up to the Chouette,--the relentless tormentor of her early
years,--and whom she afterwards so unexpectedly recognised when in
company with Rodolph at the _tapis-franc_ of the ogress.

The attestation of the child's death was duly drawn up and attested, but
Ferrand himself had confessed to Cecily that it had merely been employed
to obtain possession of a considerable sum of money due to the
unfortunate infant, whose decease it so falsely recorded, and who had
subsequently been drowned by his order while crossing to the Isle du
Ravageur.

It was, therefore, with appalling conviction Rodolph learnt at once the
double facts of the Goualeuse being his long-lost daughter, and of her
having perished by a violent death. Unfortunately, everything se