“Horrible!” whispered Daniel,—­“too horrible!”

But Maxime seized him by the arm, and pressing it so as almost to hurt him, said in a low, hoarse voice,—­

“That is not the worst yet.  As soon as she saw that Kergrist was surely dead, she slipped down stairs like a cat, opened the house-door noiselessly, and, gliding stealthily along the wall till she reached the body, she actually searched the still quivering corpse to assure herself that there was nothing in the pockets that could possibly compromise her.  Finding the last letter of Kergrist, she took it away with her, broke the seal, and read it; and, having found that her name was not mentioned in it, she had the amazing audacity to return to the body, and to put the letter back where she had found it.  Then only she breathed freely.  She had gotten rid of a man whom she feared.  She went to bed, and slept soundly.”

Daniel had become livid.

“That woman is a monster!” he exclaimed.

Brevan said nothing.  His eyes shone with intense hatred; his lips were quivering with indignation.  He no longer thought of discretion, of caution.  He forgot himself, and gave himself up to his feelings.

“But I have not done yet, Daniel,” he said, after a pause.  “There is another crime on record, of older date.  The first appearance of Miss Brandon in Paris society.  You ought to know that also.

“One evening, about four years ago, the president of the Mutual Discount Society came into the cashier’s room to tell him, that, on the following day, the board of directors would examine his books.  The cashier, an unfortunate man by the name of Malgat, replied that every thing was ready; but, the moment the president had turned his back, he took a sheet of paper, and wrote something like this:—­

“’Forgive me, I have been an honest man forty years long; now a fatal passion has made me mad.  I have drawn money from the bank which was intrusted to my care; and, in order to screen my defalcations, I have forged several notes.  I cannot conceal my crime any longer.  The first defalcation is only six months old.  The whole amount is about four hundred thousand francs.  I cannot bear the disgrace which I have incurred; in an hour I shall have ceased to live.’

“Malgat put this letter in a prominent place on his desk, and then rushed out, without a cent in his pocket, to throw himself into the canal.  But when he reached the bank, and saw the foul, black water, he was frightened.  For hours and hours he walked up and down, asking God in his madness for courage.  He never found that courage.

“But what was he to do?  He could not flee, having no money; and where should he hide?  He could not return to his bank; for there, by this time, his crime must have become known.  In his despair he ran as far as the Champs Elysees, and late in the night he knocked at the door of Miss Brandon’s house.

“They did not know yet what had happened, and he was admitted.  Then, in his wild despair, he told them all, begging them to give him a couple of hundreds only of the four hundred thousand which he had stolen in order to give them to Miss Brandon,—­a hundred only, to enable him to escape to Belgium.