“Some one must have intercepted the letters.”

“Obviously.  But that does not do away with the fact that he wrote them to a dead man and made his confidences to a dead man and told him of his wife’s criminal intentions.”

Mazeroux was silent.  He, too, seemed greatly perplexed.

They spent part of the afternoon in asking about old Langernault’s habits, hoping to receive some useful clue from the people who had known him.  But their efforts led to nothing.

At six o’clock, as they were about to start, Don Luis found that the car had run out of petrol and sent Mazeroux in a trap to the outskirts of Alencon to fetch some.  He employed the delay in going to look at the Old Castle outside the village.

He had to follow a hedged road leading to an open space, planted with lime trees, where a massive wooden gate stood in the middle of a wall.  The gate was locked.  Don Luis walked along the wall, which was, in fact, very high and presented no opening.  Nevertheless, he managed to climb over by means of the branches of a tree.

The park consisted of unkept lawns, overgrown with large wild flowers, and grass-covered avenues leading on the right to a distant mound, thickly dotted with ruins, and, on the left, to a small, tumbledown house with ill-fitting shutters.

He was turning in this direction, when he was much surprised to perceive fresh footprints on a border which had been soaked with the recent rain.  And he could see that these footprints had been made by a woman’s boots, a pair of elegant and dainty boots.

“Who the devil comes walking here?” he thought.

He found more footprints a little farther, on another border which the owner of the boots had crossed, and they led him away from the house, toward a series of clumps of trees where he saw them twice more.  Then he lost sight of them for good.

He was standing near a large, half-ruined barn, built against a very tall bank.  Its worm-eaten doors seemed merely balanced on their hinges.  He went up and looked through a crack in the wood.  Inside the windowless barn was in semi-darkness, for but little light came through the openings stopped up with straw, especially as the day was beginning to wane.  He was able to distinguish a heap of barrels, broken wine-presses, old ploughs, and scrap-iron of all kinds.

“This is certainly not where my fair stroller turned her steps,” thought Don Luis.  “Let’s look somewhere else.”

Nevertheless, he did not move.  He had noticed a noise in the barn.

He listened and heard nothing.  But as he wanted to get to the bottom of things he forced out a couple of planks with his shoulder and stepped in.

The breach which he had thus contrived admitted a little light.  He could see enough to make his way between two casks, over some broken window frames, to an empty space on the far side.

His eyes grew accustomed to the darkness as he went on.  For all that, he knocked his head against something which he had not perceived, something hanging up above, something rather hard which, when set in motion, swung to and fro with a curious grating sound.