her breath failed to come. The letter slipped from her trembling hands;
she sank into a chair, and said, stammering,--

"It is no use to struggle any longer: we are lost!"

There was something grand in Dionysia's gesture and the admirable accent
of her voice, as she said,--

"Why don't you say at once, my mother, that Jacques is an incendiary and
an assassin?"

Raising her head with an air of dauntless energy, with trembling lips,
and fierce glances full of wrath and disdain, she added,--

"And do I really remain the only one to defend him,--him, who, in his
days of prosperity, had so many friends? Well, so be it!"

Naturally, M. Folgat had been less deeply moved than either the
marchioness or M. de Chandore; and hence he was also the first to
recover his calmness.

"We shall be two, madam, at all events," he said; "for I should never
forgive myself, if I allowed myself to be influenced by that letter.
It would be inexcusable, since I know by experience what your heart
has told you instinctively. Imprisonment has horrors which affect the
strongest and stoutest of minds. The days in prison are interminable,
and the nights have nameless terrors. The innocent man in his lonely
cell feels as if he were becoming guilty, as the man of soundest
intellect would begin to doubt himself in a madhouse"--