Nemesis and to tell all to the Countess, I am mistaken in faces! For the
moment she was silent, and guess the only words the mother uttered when
her lover, he on whose account her daughter had suffered so much,
approached their common victim: 'Above all, do not injure her lovely
lashes!' What horrible irony, was it not? Horrible!"

The young man sank upon a bench as he uttered that cry of distress and of
remorse, which Montfanon mechanically repeated, as if startled by the
tragical confidence he had just received.

Montfanon shook his gray head several times as if deliberating; then
forced Dorsenne to rise, chiding him thus:

"Come, Julien, we can not remain here all the afternoon dreaming and
sighing like young women! The child is dead. We can not restore her to
life, you in despairing, I in deploring. We should do better to look in
the face our responsibility in that sinister adventure, to repent of it
and to expiate it."

"Our responsibility?" interrogated Julien. "I see mine, although I can
truly not see yours."

"Yours and mine," replied Montfanon. "I am no sophist, and I am not in
the habit of shifting my conscience. Yes or no," he insisted, with a
return of his usual excitement, "did I leave the catacombs to arrange
that unfortunate duel? Yes or no, did I yield to the paroxysm of choler
which possessed me on hearing of the engagement of Ardea and on finding
that I was in the presence of that equivocal Hafner? Yes or no, did that
duel help to enlighten Madame Gorka as to her husband's doings, and, in
consequence, Mademoiselle Steno as to her mother's? Did you not relate