disappeared from view, for a sort of little chapel had been set up, decked with a multitude of portraits.  In the centre were photographs of Valerie and Reine, both of them at twenty years of age, so that they looked like twin sisters; while symmetrically disposed all around was an extraordinary number of other portraits, again showing Valerie and Reine, now as children, now as girls, and now as women, in every sort of position, too, and every kind of toilet.  And below them on the table, like an offering on an altar, was found more than one hundred thousand francs, in gold, and silver, and even copper; indeed, the whole fortune which Morange had been saving up for several years by eating only dry bread, like a pauper.

At last, then, one knew what he had done with his savings; he had given them to his dead wife and daughter, who had remained his will, passion, and ambition.  Haunted by remorse at having killed them while dreaming of making them rich, he reserved for them that money which they had so keenly desired, and which they would have spent with so much ardor.  It was still and ever for them that he earned it, and he took it to them, lavished it upon them, never devoting even a tithe of it to any egotistical pleasure, absorbed as he was in his vision-fraught worship and eager to pacify and cheer their spirits.  And the whole neighborhood gossiped endlessly about the old mad gentleman who had let himself die of wretchedness by the side of a perfect treasure, piled coin by coin upon a table, and for twenty years past tendered to the portraits of his wife and daughter, even as flowers might have been offered to their memory.

About six o’clock, when Mathieu reached the works, he found the place terrified by the catastrophe.  Ever since the morning he had been rendered anxious by Morange’s letter, which had greatly surprised and worried him with that extraordinary story of Alexandre turning up once more, being welcomed by Constance, and introduced by her into the establishment.  Plain as was the greater part of the letter, it contained some singularly incoherent passages, and darted from one point to another with incomprehensible suddenness.  Mathieu had read it three times, indulging on each occasion in fresh hypotheses of a gloomier and gloomier nature; for the more he reflected, the more did the affair seem to him to be fraught with menace.  Then, on reaching the rendezvous appointed by Morange, he found himself in presence of those bleeding bodies which Victor Moineaud had just picked up and laid out side by side!  Silent, chilled to his bones, Mathieu listened to his son, Denis, who had hastened up to tell him of the unexplainable misfortune, the two men falling one atop of the other, first the old mad accountant, and then the young fellow whom nobody knew and who seemed to have dropped from heaven.