here. If he were an impostor, things would go cruelly hard with him.
Impostor? Strange how, in spite of all evidence against him, she still
felt a vital sureness in him somewhere; a radical reality, a convincing
quality of presence. At times he seemed like an actor playing his own
character. She could never quite get rid of that feeling.

In her anxiety--for she was in the affair for good or ill--she went again
to Monsieur Garon.

"You believe in Monsieur Valmond, dear avocat?" she asked.

The little man looked at her admiringly, though his admiration was a
quaint, Arcadian thing; and, perching his head on one side abstractedly,
he answered:

"Ah, yes, ah, yes! Such candour! He is the son of Napoleon and a
certain princess, born after Napoleon's fall, not long before his death."

"Then, of course, Monsieur Valmond is really nameless?" she asked.

"Ah, there is the point--the only point; but His Excellency can clear up
all that, and will do so in good time, he says. He maintains that France
will accept him."

"But the Government here, will they put him down? proceed against him?
Can they?"

"Ah, yes, I fear they can proceed against him. He may recruit men,
but he may not drill and conspire, you see. Yet"--the old man smiled,
as though at some distant and pleasing prospect "the cause is a great