which she had never seen me. I stood by the doorway of the waiting-room, and saw her sitting side by side with her favoured lover, they two as happy and as absorbed in each other as children at play in a garden. You know all the rest. Yes, it was I who watched in front of the Henri Quatre, saw those two laughing together in the candle-light: it was I who sprang out of the thicket in the forest and shot them down, one after the other, left them lying there side by side, dead. I had a strange wild feeling of happiness as I rushed away into the depths of the wood—a sense of triumph. I had won my love from her new lover. She had been mine only; and she would be mine now until the end. I had saved her from her own weakness—saved, her from the dishonour which her folly must have made inevitable."
He paused for a few moments, but neither Dora nor Heathcote spoke, and after the briefest silence he went on with his confession.
"I never meant to survive my victims, except just so long as would be necessary to put my affairs in order, and to transfer my securities to England, where those of my own flesh and blood might profit by my fortune. In order to do this I got quietly back to Paris, and began to take up the threads of my business life with a view to closing the book for ever. You know enough of my character and my history to understand that I have always had perfect command over my emotions, and you will therefore believe that I was able to go about my daily business, to mix with my fellow-men, with as serene a manner and countenance as if not a ripple of passion had crossed the stagnant surface of my plodding nature. I had so trained myself that the man of passion and emotions was one being, and the man of business another, a creature totally apart. And now, for a while at least, the man of feeling was dead and buried, and only the money-making automaton remained.
"It happened at that time that a cloud of disaster swept over the Paris Bourse. Had I wound up my affairs at that period, I should have been a heavy loser; and I, to whom the science of finance was a passion, could not submit to losses which I knew how to avoid. So I delayed the settlement of my affairs, and even allowed myself to be tempted into fresh enterprises. Yet scarcely a night passed on which I did not look at my pistols before I lay down to rest, and long for the time when I should feel myself free to end my miserable life."
"And in those days you went frequently to the cemetery, to place your tribute of roses on your victim's grave," said Heathcote.
"It was the only mark of affection I could show to the woman my love had killed," answered Wyllard; "the only token of respect for my wife."
"Your wife?" exclaimed the other. "Then Barbe Girot was right in her supposition. You loved Marie Prévol well enough to marry her."
