With absolute certainty that he was about to learn of a new calamity, he broke the seal, and opening the coarse cafe paper, was shocked by the following words: 

“DEAR SIR—­You have handed your cashier over to the law, and you acted properly, convinced as you were of his dishonesty.

“But if it was he who took three hundred and fifty thousand francs from your safe, was it he also who took Mme. Fauvel’s diamonds?”

This was a terrible blow to a man whose life hitherto had been an unbroken chain of prosperity, who could recall the past without one bitter regret, without remembering any sorrow deep enough to bring forth a tear.

What!  His wife deceive him!  And among all men, to choose one vile enough to rob her of her jewels, and force her to be his accomplice in the ruin of an innocent young man!

For did not the letter before him assert this to be a fact, and tell him how to convince himself of its truth?

M. Fauvel was as bewildered as if he had been knocked on the head with a club.  It was impossible for his scattered ideas to take in the enormity of what these dreadful words intimated.  He seemed to be mentally and physically paralyzed, as he sat there staring blankly at the letter.

But this stupefaction suddenly changed to indignant rage.

“What a fool I am!” he cried, “to listen to such base lies, such malicious charges against the purest woman whom God ever sent to bless a man!”

And he angrily crumpled up the letter, and threw it into the empty fireplace, saying: 

“I will forget having read it.  I will not soil my mind by letting it dwell upon such turpitude!”

He said this, and he thought it; but, for all that, he could not open the rest of his letters.  The anonymous missive stood before his eyes in letters of fire, and drove every other thought from his mind.

That penetrating, clinging, all-corroding worm, suspicion, had taken possession of his soul; and as he leaned over his desk, with his face buried in his hands, thinking over many things which had lately occurred, insignificant at the time, but fearfully ominous now, this unwillingly admitted germ of suspicion grew and expanded until it became certainty.

But, resolved that he would not think of his wife in connection with so vile a deed, he imagined a thousand wild excuses for the mischief-maker who took this mode of annoying him; of course there was no truth in his assertions, but from curiosity he would like to know who had written it.  And yet suppose——­

“Merciful God! can it be true?” he wildly cried, as the idea of his wife’s guilt would obstinately return to his troubled mind.

Thinking that the writing might throw some light on the mystery, he started up and tremblingly picked the fatal letter out of the ashes.  Carefully smoothing it out, he laid it on his desk, and studied the heavy strokes, light strokes, and capitals of every word.