Greatly surprised, he stopped playing and looked at me: 

“What!  Don’t you know?  Haven’t you heard about Mademoiselle Pearl?”

“No.”

“Didn’t your father ever tell you?”

“No.”

“Well, well, that’s funny!  That certainly is funny!  Why, it’s a regular romance!”

He paused, and then continued: 

“And if you only knew how peculiar it is that you should ask me that to-day, on Twelfth Night!”

“Why?”

“Why?  Well, listen.  Forty-one years ago to day, the day of the Epiphany, the following events occurred:  We were then living at Roily-le-Tors, on the ramparts; but in order that you may understand, I must first explain the house.  Roily is built on a hill, or, rather, on a mound which overlooks a great stretch of prairie.  We had a house there with a beautiful hanging garden supported by the old battlemented wall; so that the house was in the town on the streets, while the garden overlooked the plain.  There was a door leading from the garden to the open country, at the bottom of a secret stairway in the thick wall—­the kind you read about in novels.  A road passed in front of this door, which was provided with a big bell; for the peasants, in order to avoid the roundabout way, would bring their provisions up this way.

“You now understand the place, don’t you?  Well, this year, at Epiphany, it had been snowing for a week.  One might have thought that the world was coming to an end.  When we went to the ramparts to look over the plain, this immense white, frozen country, which shone like varnish, would chill our very souls.  One might have thought that the Lord had packed the world in cotton to put it away in the storeroom for old worlds.  I can assure you that it was dreary looking.

“We were a very numerous family at that time my father, my mother, my uncle and aunt, my two brothers and four cousins; they were pretty little girls; I married the youngest.  Of all that crowd, there are only three of us left:  my wife, I, and my sister-in-law, who lives in Marseilles.  Zounds! how quickly a family like that dwindles away!  I tremble when I think of it!  I was fifteen years old then, since I am fifty-six now.

“We were going to celebrate the Epiphany, and we were all happy, very happy!  Everybody was in the parlor, awaiting dinner, and my oldest brother, Jacques, said:  ’There has been a dog howling out in the plain for about ten minutes; the poor beast must be lost.’

“He had hardly stopped talking when the garden bell began to ring.  It had the deep sound of a church bell, which made one think of death.  A shiver ran through everybody.  My father called the servant and told him to go outside and look.  We waited in complete silence; we were thinking of the snow which covered the ground.  When the man returned he declared that he had seen nothing.  The dog kept up its ceaseless howling, and always from the same spot.