furniture and boxes were broken, the signs of
violence could be seen everywhere. But if her search had at first proved
fruitless, there was that in her excitement and attitude which led me to
believe that she had found the mysterious documents at last. I glanced
at the bed, and professional instinct told me all that had happened. The
mattress had been flung contemptuously down by the bedside, and across
it, face downwards, lay the body of the Count, like one of the paper
envelopes that strewed the carpet--he too was nothing now but an
envelope. There was something grotesquely horrible in the attitude of
the stiffening rigid limbs.

"The dying man must have hidden the counter-deed under his pillow to
keep it safe so long as life should last; and his wife must have guessed
his thought; indeed, it might be read plainly in his last dying gesture,
in the convulsive clutch of his claw-like hands. The pillow had been
flung to the floor at the foot of the bed; I could see the print of
her heel upon it. At her feet lay a paper with the Count's arms on the
seals; I snatched it up, and saw that it was addressed to me. I looked
steadily at the Countess with the pitiless clear-sightedness of an
examining magistrate confronting a guilty creature. The contents were
blazing in the grate; she had flung them on the fire at the sound of our
approach, imagining, from a first hasty glance at the provisions which
I had suggested for her children, that she was destroying a will which
disinherited them. A tormented conscience and involuntary horror of the
deed which she had done had taken away all power of reflection. She had
been caught in the act, and possibly the scaffold was rising before her
eyes, and she already felt the felon's branding iron.

"There she stood gasping for breath, waiting for us to speak, staring at
us with haggard eyes.

"I went across to the grate and pulled out an unburned fragment. 'Ah,
madame!' I exclaimed, 'you have ruined your children! Those papers were
their titles to their property.'

"Her mouth twitched, she looked as if she were threatened by a paralytic
seizure.

"'Eh! eh!' cried Gobseck; the harsh, shrill tone grated upon our ears
like the sound of a brass candlestick scratching a marble surface.

"There was a pause, then the old man turned to me and said quietly:

"'Do you intend Mme. la Comtesse to suppose that I am not the rightful
owner of the property sold to me by her late husband? This house b