“Give it me—­it is mine!”

“No! but you shall hear what it says.  Listen:—­

“’I could have borne with resignation the miserable part you have imposed upon me.  After luring me from my home with dazzling offers, after promising me a life of luxury and splendid ease, you rudely, cruelly dispelled the illusion, and made it plain to me that I had shared the lot of a pauper.  All this I could have borne—­poverty, however distasteful, but not the infamy, the degradation, of being the partner and associate of your evil deeds.  Sooner than fall so low I prefer to leave you for ever.  Do not seek for me.  I have done with you.  All is at an end between us!’”

CHAPTER III.

THE MOUSETRAP.

“Well,” said the judge, when he had finished reading, “you see what your wife thinks of you.  What do you say now?”

“There is not a word of truth in that letter.  It is a tissue of misstatements from beginning to end.  You must place no reliance upon it.”

“There you must allow me to differ from you.  This letter is, in my belief, perfectly genuine.  It supplies a most important link in the chain of evidence, and I shall give it the weight it deserves.  But enough—­will you still deny your guilt?”

“It is Ledantec’s doing,” said Gascoigne, following out a line of thought of his own.  “She was nothing loth, perhaps, for he has been instilling insidious poison into her ears for these weeks past.  I had my suspicions, but could prove nothing; now I know.  It was for this, to put money in his purse for her extravagance, that he first robbed, then struck down the baron.”

“Why do you still persist in this shallow line of defence?  You cannot deceive me; it would be far better to make a clean breast of it at once.”

“I have already told you all I know.  I repeat, I saw Ledantec strike the blow.”

“Psha! this is puerile.  I will be frank with you.  We have the fullest and strongest evidence of your guilt—­why, then, will you not confess it?”

“I have nothing to confess; I am perfectly innocent.  I was the poor man’s friend, not his murderer.  I tried hard to save him, but, unhappily, I was too late.”

“You will not confess?”

A flush of anger rose to Gascoigne’s cheek; his eyes flashed with the indignation he felt at being thus bullied and browbeaten; his lips quivered, but still he made no reply.

“Come! you have played this comedy long enough,” said the judge, his manner growing more insolent, his look more threatening.  “Will you, or will you not, confess?”

Gascoigne met his gaze resolutely, but with a dogged, obstinate silence, the result of a firm determination not to utter a word.

“This is unbearable,” said the judge, angrily, after having repeated his question several times without eliciting any reply.  “Take him away!  Let him be kept in complete isolation, in one of the separate cells of the Mousetrap—­the Souriciere.”