steps to let her know that he would never allow her to marry Darzac
--that he still loved her.

Mademoiselle Stangerson never for one moment hesitated to confide
in Monsieur Darzac. She showed him the letter in which Jean Roussel
asked her to recall the first hours of their union in their beautiful
and charming Louisville home. "The presbytery has lost nothing of
its charm, nor the garden its brightness," he had written. The
scoundrel pretended to be rich and claimed the right of taking her
back to Louisville. She had told Darzac that if her father should
know of her dishonour, she would kill herself. Monsieur Darzac had
sworn to silence her persecutor, even if he had to kill him. He
was outwitted and would have succumbed had it not been for the
genius of Rouletabille.

Mademoiselle Stangerson was herself helpless in the hands of such a
villain. She had tried to kill him when he had first threatened and
then attacked her in The Yellow Room. She had, unfortunately,
failed, and felt herself condemned to be for ever at the mercy of
this unscrupulous wretch who was continually demanding her presence
at clandestine interviews. When he sent her the letter through the
Post Office, asking her to meet him, she had refused. The result
of her refusal was the tragedy of The Yellow Room. The second time
he wrote asking for a meeting, the letter reaching her in her sick
chamber, she had avoided him by sleeping with her servants. In that
letter the scoundrel had warned her that, since she was too ill to
come to him, he would come to her, and that he would be in her
chamber at a particular hour on a particular night. Knowing that
she had everything to fear from Ballmeyer, she had left her chamber
on that night. It was then that the incident of the "inexplicable