"Oh! monsieur," she said, "how could you--"

"He desired it, madame. There was something really dreadful in
following the funeral of a living man, a man my heart cared for, an
innocent man! The poor young fellow never ceased to look at me. He
seemed to live only in me. He wanted, he said, that I should carry to
his mother his last sigh."

"And did you?"

"At the peace of Amiens I went to France, for the purpose of taking to
the mother those blessed words, 'He was innocent.' I religiously
undertook that pilgrimage. But Madame Magnan had died of consumption.
It was not without deep emotion that I burned the letter of which I
was the bearer. You will perhaps smile at my German imagination, but I
see a drama of sad sublimity in the eternal secrecy which engulfed
those parting words cast between two graves, unknown to all creation,
like the cry uttered in a desert by some lonely traveller whom a lion
seizes."

"And if," I said, interrupting him, "you were brought face to face
with a man now in this room, and were told, 'This is the murderer!'
would not that be another drama? And what would you do?"

Monsieur Hermann looked for his hat and went away.

"You are behaving like a young man, and very heedlessly," said my
neighbor. "Look at Taillefer!--there, seated on that sofa at the
corner of the fireplace. Mademoiselle Fanny is offering him a cup of
coffee. He smiles. Would a murderer to whom that tale must have been