It was too dark to see.  Don Luis took an electric lantern from his pocket and pressed the spring.

“Damn it all!” he swore, falling back aghast.

Above him hung a skeleton!

And the next moment he uttered another oath.  A second skeleton hung beside the first!

They were both fastened by stout ropes to rings fixed in the rafters of the barn.  Their heads dangled from the slip-knots.  The one against which Perenna had struck was still moving slightly and the bones clicked together with a gruesome sound.

He dragged forward a rickety table, propped it up as best he could, and climbed onto it to examine the two skeletons more closely.  They were turned toward each other, face to face.  The first was considerably bigger than the second.  They were obviously the skeletons of a man and a woman.  Even when they were not moved by a jolt of any kind, the wind blowing through the crevices in the barn set them lightly swinging to and fro, in a sort of very slow, rhythmical dance.

But what perhaps was most impressive in this ghastly spectacle was the fact that each of the skeletons, though deprived of every rag of clothing, still wore a gold ring, too wide now that the flesh had disappeared, but held, as in hooks, by the bent joints of the fingers.

He slipped off the rings with a shiver of disgust, and found that they were wedding rings.  Each bore a date inside, the same date, 12 August, 1887, and two names:  “Alfred—­Victorine.”

“Husband and wife,” he murmured.  “Is it a double suicide?  Or a murder?  But how is it possible that the two skeletons have not yet been discovered?  Can one conceive that they have been here since the death of old Langernault, since the government has taken possession of the estate and made it impossible for anybody to walk in?”

He paused to reflect.

“Anybody?  I don’t know about that, considering that I saw footprints in the garden, and that a woman has been there this very day!”

The thought of the unknown visitor engrossed him once more, and he got down from the table.  In spite of the noise which he had heard, it was hardly to be supposed that she had entered the barn.  And, after a few minutes’ search, he was about to go out, when there came, from the left, a clash of things falling about and some hoops dropped to the ground not far from where he stood.

They came from above, from a loft likewise crammed with various objects and implements and reached by a ladder.  Was he to believe that the visitor, surprised by his arrival, had taken refuge in that hiding-place and made a movement that caused the fall of the hoops?

Don Luis placed his electric lantern on a cask in such a way as to send the light right up to the loft.  Seeing nothing suspicious, nothing but an arsenal of old pickaxes, rakes, and disused scythes, he attributed what had happened so some animal, to some stray cat; and, to make sure, he walked quickly to the ladder and went up.