“That’s for me to decide.  Mr. Valentin believed it would, and that’s why he told me.  Your name was almost the last word he spoke.”

Mrs. Bread was evidently awe-struck by this statement; she shook her clasped hands slowly up and down.  “Excuse me, sir,” she said, “if I take a great liberty.  Is it the solemn truth you are speaking?  I must ask you that; must I not, sir?”

“There’s no offense.  It is the solemn truth; I solemnly swear it.  Mr. Valentin himself would certainly have told me more if he had been able.”

“Oh, sir, if he knew more!”

“Don’t you suppose he did?”

“There’s no saying what he knew about anything,” said Mrs. Bread, with a mild head-shake.  “He was so mightily clever.  He could make you believe he knew things that he didn’t, and that he didn’t know others that he had better not have known.”

“I suspect he knew something about his brother that kept the marquis civil to him,” Newman propounded; “he made the marquis feel him.  What he wanted now was to put me in his place; he wanted to give me a chance to make the marquis feel me.”

“Mercy on us!” cried the old waiting-woman, “how wicked we all are!”

“I don’t know,” said Newman; “some of us are wicked, certainly.  I am very angry, I am very sore, and I am very bitter, but I don’t know that I am wicked.  I have been cruelly injured.  They have hurt me, and I want to hurt them.  I don’t deny that; on the contrary, I tell you plainly that it is the use I want to make of your secret.”

Mrs. Bread seemed to hold her breath.  “You want to publish them—­you want to shame them?”

“I want to bring them down,—­down, down, down!  I want to turn the tables upon them—­I want to mortify them as they mortified me.  They took me up into a high place and made me stand there for all the world to see me, and then they stole behind me and pushed me into this bottomless pit, where I lie howling and gnashing my teeth!  I made a fool of myself before all their friends; but I shall make something worse of them.”

This passionate sally, which Newman uttered with the greater fervor that it was the first time he had had a chance to say all this aloud, kindled two small sparks in Mrs. Bread’s fixed eyes.  “I suppose you have a right to your anger, sir; but think of the dishonor you will draw down on Madame de Cintre.”

“Madame de Cintre is buried alive,” cried Newman.  “What are honor or dishonor to her?  The door of the tomb is at this moment closing behind her.”

“Yes, it’s most awful,” moaned Mrs. Bread.

“She has moved off, like her brother Valentin, to give me room to work.  It’s as if it were done on purpose.”

“Surely,” said Mrs. Bread, apparently impressed by the ingenuity of this reflection.  She was silent for some moments; then she added, “And would you bring my lady before the courts?”

“The courts care nothing for my lady,” Newman replied.  “If she has committed a crime, she will be nothing for the courts but a wicked old woman.”