e evening
shadows make me long to flee. I am afraid at night.

"No! I would not have owned such a thing before reaching my present
age. But now I may tell everything. One may fear imaginary dangers at
eighty-two years old. But before actual danger I have never turned back,
_mesdames_.

"That affair so upset my mind, filled me with such a deep, mysterious
unrest that I never could tell it. I kept it in that inmost part, that
corner where we conceal our sad, our shameful secrets, all the
weaknesses of our life which cannot be confessed.

"I will tell you that strange happening just as it took place, with no
attempt to explain it. Unless I went mad for one short hour it must be
explainable, though. Yet I was not mad, and I will prove it to you.
Imagine what you will. Here are the simple facts:

"It was in 1827, in July. I was quartered with my regiment in Rouen.

"One day, as I was strolling on the quay, I came across a man I believed
I recognized, though I could not place him with certainty. I
instinctively went more slowly, ready to pause. The stranger saw my
impulse, looked at me, and fell into my arms.

"It was a friend of my younger days, of whom I had been very fond. He
seemed to have become half a century older in the five years since I had
seen him. His hair was white, and he stooped in his walk, as if he were
exhausted. He understood my amazement and told me the story of his life.

"A terrible event had broken him down. He had fallen madly in love with
a young girl and married her in a kind of dreamlike ecstasy. After a
year of unalloyed bliss and unexhausted passion, she had died suddenly
of heart disease, no doubt killed by love itself.

"He had left the country on the very day of her funeral, and had come to
live in his hotel at Rouen. He remained there, solitary and desperate,
grief slowly mining him, so wretched that he constantly thought of
suicide.

"'As I thus came across you again,' he said, 'I shall ask a great favor
of you. I want you to go to my chateau and get some papers I urgently
need. They are in the writing-desk of my room, of _our_ room. I cannot
send a servant or a lawyer, as the errand must be kept private. I want
absolute silence.

"'I shall give you the key of the room, which I locked carefully myself
before leaving, and the key to the writing-desk. I shall also give you a
note for the gardener, who will let you in.

"'Come to breakfast with me to-morrow, and we'll talk the matt