On leaving the house on Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré, at the end of that luncheon which had left him with the impression of a nightmare, Landri recalled those words among all the rest, and that insinuation so insulting to his Valentine. He found therein an additional reason for desiring to know who had committed that two-fold private crime, unpunishable by law, yet truly ferocious: that theft of a correspondence, aggravated by an anonymous denunciation. In that interview, the strain of which was almost beyond human endurance, he had seen distinctly that only that knowledge could relieve in any degree the agony with which the marquis was suffocating. He himself realized the necessity of the destruction of those "other documents," as the anonymous writer had said, in heartless official phras

