ely written, in a fine,
regular hand. When she began to read it her attention was wandering, for
her mind was full of Sonia Danidoff and Thomery, and what she had
ascertained regarding their relation to each other; but little by little
she became absorbed in what she was reading, till her whole attention
was taken captive. As she read on, however, her eyes opened more and
more widely, there was a look of keenest anguish in them, her features
contracted as if in pain, her bosom heaved, her fingers were trembling
under the stress of some intense emotion:

"Oh, my God! Ah! My God!" she gasped out several times in a half-choked
voice.

* * * * *

Silence had reigned for a long while in the smart town house of the
Baroness de Vibray in the Avenue Henri-Martin....

From without came no sound; the avenue was quiet, deserted; the night
was dark. But when three o'clock struck, the bedroom of Madame de Vibray
was still flooded with light. She had not left her writing-table since
she had read the letter of her bankers, Messieurs Barbey-Nanteuil. She
wrote on, and on, without intermission.

III

UNEXPECTED COMPLICATIONS

At nine o'clock in the morning, the staff of that great evening paper,
_La Capitale_, were assembled in the vast editorial room, writing out
their copy, in the midst of a perfect hubbub of continual comings and
goings, of regular shindies, of perpetual discussions.

A stranger entering this room, which among its frequenters went by the
name of "The Wild Beasts' Cage," might easily have thought he was
witnessing some thirty schoolboys at play in recreation time, instead of
being in the presence of famous journalists celebrated for their reports
and articles.

Jerome Fandor had no sooner appeared on the threshold than he was
accorded a variety of greetings--ironical, cordial, fault-finding,
sympathetic. But he ignored them all; for, like most of those who came
into the editorial room at this hour, he was preoccupied with one thing
only--where the caprice of his editorial secretary would send him flying
for news, in the course of a few minutes? On what difficult and delicate
quest would he be despatched? It depended on the exigencies of passing
events, on how questions of the hour struck the editorial secretary, in
relation to Fandor.

Just as he had expected, the editorial secretary called him.

"Hey! Fandor, come here a minute! I am on the make-up: what have you g