terrible accusation, and a still more terrible emergency?"

"That is the difficulty, Jacques: you are the victim of your own
imagination. And who could help it in your place? M. Folgat said so
only yesterday. There is no man living, who, after four days' close
confinement, can keep his mind cool. Grief and solitude are bad
counsellors. Jacques, come to yourself; listen to your dearest friends
who speak to you through me. Jacques, your Dionysia beseeches you.
Speak!"

"I cannot."

"Why not?"

She waited for some seconds; and, as he did not reply, she said, not
without a slight accent of bitterness in her voice,--

"Is it not the first duty of an innocent man to establish his
innocence?"

The prisoner, with a movement of despair, clasped his hands over his
brow. Then bending over Dionysia, so that she felt his breath in her
hair, he said,--

"And when he cannot, when he cannot, establish his innocence?"

She drew back, pale unto death, tottering so that she had to lean
against the wall, and cast upon Jacques de Boiscoran glances in which
the whole horror of her soul was clearly expressed.