“Florence!  Florence!”

Though he had so carefully prepared the catastrophe, and brought it about with such determination, its results seemed suddenly to stagger him.  He hunted for the girl with terrified eyes.  He stooped down and crawled round the chaos shrouded in clouds of dust.  He looked through the interstices.  He saw nothing.

Florence was buried under the ruins, dead, invisible, as be had anticipated.

“Dead!” he said, with staring eyes and a look of stupor on his face.  “Dead!  Florence is dead!”

Once again he lapsed into a state of absolute prostration, which gradually slackened his legs, brought him to the ground and paralyzed him.  His two efforts, following so close upon each other and ending in disasters of which he had been the immediate witness, seemed to have robbed him of all his remaining energy.

With no hatred in him, since Arsene Lupin no longer lived, with no love, since Florence was no more, he looked like a man who has lost his last motive for existence.

Twice his lips uttered the name of Florence.  Was he regretting his friend?  Having reached the last of that appalling series of crimes, was he imagining the several stages, each marked with a corpse?  Was something like a conscience making itself felt deep down in that brute?  Or was it not rather the sort of physical torpor that numbs the sated beast of prey, glutted with flesh, drunk with blood, a torpor that is almost voluptuousness?

Nevertheless, he once more repeated Florence’s name, and tears rolled down his cheeks.

He lay long in this condition, gloomy and motionless; and when, after again taking a few sips of his medicine, he went back to his work, he did so mechanically, with none of that gayety which had made him hop on his legs and set about his murder as though he were going to a pleasure party.

He began by returning to the bush from which Lupin had seen him emerge.  Behind this bush, between two trees, was a shelter containing tools and arms, spades, rakes, guns, and rolls of wire and rope.

Making several journeys, he carried them to the well, intending to throw them down it before he went away.  He next examined every particle of the little mound up which he had climbed, in order to make sure that he was not leaving the least trace of his passage.

He made a similar examination of those parts of the lawn on which he had stepped, except the path leading to the well, the inspection of which he kept for the last.  He brushed up the trodden grass and carefully smoothed the trampled earth.

He was obviously anxious and seemed to be thinking of other things, while at the same time mechanically doing those things which a murderer knows by force of habit that it is wise to do.

One little incident seemed to wake him up.  A wounded swallow fell to the ground close by where he stood.  He stooped, caught it, and crushed it in his hands, kneading it like a scrap of crumpled paper.  And his eyes shone with a savage delight as he gazed at the blood that trickled from the poor bird and reddened his hands.