And all these people whose abominable intrigues Henrietta was explaining to him were apparently better known to him than to her, as if he had frequently been in contact with them, or even lived in their intimacy.  He gave his judgment on each one with amazing assurance, as the occasion presented itself, saying,—­

“Ah!  There I recognize Sarah and Mrs. Brian.”

Or,—­

“Sir Thorn never does otherwise.”

Or, again,—­

“Yes, that is all over Maxime de Brevan.”

And, according to the different phases of the account, he would laugh bitterly and almost convulsively, or he would break out in imprecations.

“What a trick!” he murmured with an accent of deep horror, “what an infernal snare!”

At another point he turned deadly pale, and almost trembled on his chair, as if he were feeling ill, and were about to fall.  Henrietta was telling him at that moment, from Daniel’s recital, the circumstances under which M. de Kergrist had died, and Malgat had disappeared,—­that poor cashier who had left such an immense deficit behind; who had been condemned to penal servitude; and whose body the police believed to have found in a wood near Paris.  But, as soon as the young girl had finished, he rose all of a sudden, and cried out in a formidable voice,—­

“I have them now, the wretches! this time I have them!”

And, breaking down under his excessive excitement, he sank into his chair, covering his face with his hands.  Henrietta was dumfounded; she looked aghast at the old man, in whom she now placed all her hopes.  Already, the night before, she had had some suspicions that he was not what he seemed to be; now she was quite sure.  But who was he?  She had nothing to go by to solve that riddle.

This only she thought she saw clearly, that Sarah Brandon, Mrs. Brian, and M. Thomas Elgin, as well as M. de Brevan, had at some time or other come in personal contact with Papa Ravinet, and that he hated them mortally.

“Unless he should try to deceive me,” she thought, not having quite shaken off all doubts yet.

He had in the meantime mastered his emotion, and was regaining all his composure.

“Let no one, henceforth, deny Providence!” he exclaimed.  “Ah! fools and idiots alone can do so.  M. de Brevan had every reason to think that this house would keep the secret of his crime as safe as the grave, and so brought you here.  And here it happens I must chance to live,—­of all men, I,—­and he remain unaware of it!  By a kind of miracle we are brought together under the same roof,—­you, the daughter of Count Ville-Handry, and I, one after the other, without knowing each other; and, at the very moment when this Brevan is about to triumph, Providence brings us together, and this meeting ruins him!”

His voice betrayed his fierce joy at approaching vengeance; his sallow cheeks flushed up; and his eyes shone brilliantly.