“What are you thinking of?  I would not spoil a trinket that you value.”

She replied:  “I have made the acquaintance of a Russian princess who has a mania for physiology and dissection.  I have caught the disease, and I want to begin to dissect.  I am fond of this trinket, but I want to know what is inside.  Do as I tell you,” she continued.  “You will find in the laboratory the necessary instruments.  Go; the key is in the door.”

He consulted her look; her eye was burning, her voice broken, and she repeated:  “Go—­go!  Do you not understand me?”

He obeyed, went to the laboratory, taking the bracelet with him.  After five minutes he returned saying:  “I am very unskilful; I crushed the lid in raising it; but you wished it, and your curiosity will be satisfied.”

She could, in truth, satisfy her curiosity.  She eagerly seized the bracelet, and on the back of the plate, now left bare, she saw engraved in the gold, characters almost microscopic in size.  Through the greatest attention she succeeded in deciphering them.  She distinguished several dates, marking the year, the month, and the day, when some important event had occurred to the Princess Gulof.  These dates, accompanied by no indication of any kind, formerly sufficed to recall the principal experiments that she had practised on mankind before having discovered Samuel Brohl.  The result had not been very cheerful, for beneath this form of calendar stood a confession of faith, thus expressed, “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity!” This melancholy declaration was signed, and the signature was perfectly legible.  Mlle. Moriaz spelled it out readily, although at that moment her sight was dim, and she was convinced that the trinket, which Count Larinski had presented to her as a family relic, had belonged to Anna Petrovna, Princess Gulof.

She grew mortally pale, and lost consciousness; she seemed on the verge of an attack of delirium.  In the agitation of her mind, she imagined that she saw herself at a great distance, at the end of the world, and very small; she was climbing a mountain, on the other side of which there was a man awaiting her.  She questioned herself, “Am I, or is this traveller, Mlle. Moriaz?” She closed her eyes, and saw a blank abyss open before her, in which her life was ingulfed, whirled about, like the leaf of a tree in a whirlpool.

M. Langis drew near her, and, lightly slapping the palms of her hands, said, “What is the matter?”

She roused herself, made an effort to lift her head, and let it sink again.  The trouble that lay in the depths of her heart choked her; she experienced an irresistible need of confiding in some one, and she judged that the man who was talking to her was one of those men to whom a woman can tell her secret, one of those souls to whom she could pour out her shame without blushing.  She began, in a broken voice, a confused, disconnected recital that Camille could scarcely follow.  However, he finally understood; he felt himself divided between an immense pity for her despair, and a fierce lover’s joy that tightened his throat and well-nigh strangled him.