he found that they came from my daughter's apartment. With
fatherly solicitude he waited and listened. Violette was calling in her
sleep.

Practical enough in matters of everyday life, this girl of mine has
literary partialities of a somewhat gruesome kind, and her avowed
ambition (I quote her own words) is to write, some day, stories full of
witches and wizards, that shall make people's flesh creep. For this
reason I keep such of Anne Radcliffe's uncanny novels as I possess
carefully locked up.

I can well remember my daughter telling me at times of strange things
dreamt by her in her sleep; but not of being of a romantic or a mystical
turn myself, I have usually pooh-poohed all this as nonsense. And such I
believe is the course which fathers usually adopt if their daughters'
imaginations begin to run riot.

As for M. Zola, when he heard Violette calling in her sleep, his first
impulse was to rouse her, but all suddenly became still again. The girl
had probably sunk into a more peaceful slumber. And so, after waiting a
few minutes longer, he thought it best to leave her as she was.

Nothing further disturbed M. Zola that night; but on the following
morning, when he met Violette downstairs, he asked her how she felt, and
told her that he had heard her calling in her sleep. He had probably
formed the same opinion as I should have formed under the circumstances,
namely, that it was a case of indigestion or a little excitement.

But she turned to him and replied, 'Oh! I had such a frightful dream. . .
I was in a big black place, and there was a man on the ground covered
with blood, and people were crowding round him, talking with great
excitement. And I saw you, Monsieur Zola, and you came up looking like a
giant and waved your arms again and again, and seemed well pleased.'

M. Zola was dumbfounded. He could make nothing of it. A man in a pool of
blood and others round him; and he, Zola, waving his arms and looking
well pleased! It was nonsense; and he was disposed to laugh at the girl
and chide her. But a little later, with the arrival of some morning
newspapers, the position suddenly changed.

Here I should mention that as the Paris journals only reached M. Zola
with a delay of twelve or four-and-twenty hours, it had just been
arranged that he should be supplied with two or three London papers every
morning, and that he and Violette between them should put the telegrams
concerning the Dreyfus business into French