It had not occurred to any of them to doubt her statement, incredible though it might seem.  Had any done so her present words must have resolved all doubt, explaining as they did much that to each of her listeners had been obscure until this moment.

M. de La Tour d’Azyr, overcome; reeled away to a chair and sat down heavily.  Losing command of himself for a moment, he took his haggard face in his hands.

Through the windows open to the garden came from the distance the faint throbbing of a drum to remind them of what was happening around them.  But the sound went unheeded.  To each it must have seemed that here they were face to face with a horror greater than any that might be tormenting Paris.  At last Andre-Louis began to speak, his voice level and unutterably cold.

“M. de La Tour d’Azyr,” he said, “I trust that you’ll agree that this disclosure, which can hardly be more distasteful and horrible to you than it is to me, alters nothing, — since it effaces nothing of all that lies between us.  Or, if it alters anything, it is merely to add something to that score.  And yet...  Oh, but what can it avail to talk!  Here, monsieur, take this safe-conduct which is made out for Mme. de Plougastel’s footman, and with it make your escape as best you can.  In return I will beg of you the favour never to allow me to see you or hear of you again.”

“Andre!” His mother swung upon him with that cry.  And yet again that question.  “Have you no heart?  What has he ever done to you that you should nurse so bitter a hatred of him?”

“You shall hear, madame.  Once, two years ago in this very room I told you of a man who had brutally killed my dearest friend and debauched the girl I was to have married.  M. de La Tour d’Azyr is that man.”

A moan was her only answer.  She covered her face with her hands.

The Marquis rose slowly to his feet again.  He came slowly forward, his smouldering eyes scanning his son’s face.

“You are hard,” he said grimly.  “But I recognize the hardness.  It derives from the blood you bear.”

“Spare me that,” said Andre-Louis.

The Marquis inclined his head.  “I will not mention it again.  But I desire that you should at least understand me, and you too, Therese.  You accuse me, sir, of murdering your dearest friend.  I will admit that the means employed were perhaps unworthy.  But what other means were at my command to meet an urgency that every day since then proves to have existed?  M. de Vilmorin was a revolutionary, a man of new ideas that should overthrow society and rebuild it more akin to the desires of such as himself.  I belonged to the order that quite as justifiably desired society to remain as it was.  Not only was it better so for me and mine, but I also contend, and you have yet to prove me wrong, that it is better so for all the world; that, indeed, no other conceivable society is possible.  Every human society must