Saint-Avit.

He continued pitilessly:

"Then you aren't willing to say anything?"

I made a great effort, to produce the following pitiful phrase:

"What an exhausting day. What a night, heavy, heavy--You don't feel
like yourself, you don't know any more--"

"Yes," said the voice of Saint-Avit, as from a distance, "A heavy,
heavy night: as heavy, do you know, as when I killed Captain
Morhange."




III

THE MORHANGE-SAINT-AVIT MISSION


"So I killed Captain Morhange," André de Saint-Avit said to me the
next day, at the same time, in the same place, with a calm that took
no account of the night, the frightful night I had just been through.
"Why do I tell you this? I don't know in the least. Because of the
desert, perhaps. Are you a man capable of enduring the weight of that
confidence, and further, if necessary, of assuming the consequences it
may bring? I don't know that, either. The future will decide. For the