“Listen to me, Jacques,” she said:  “let me tell you why I ran the risk of taking this serious step, that may cost me so dear.  I come to you in the name of all your friends, in the name of M. Folgat, the great advocate whom your mother has brought down from Paris and in the name of M. Magloire, in whom you put so much confidence.  They all agree you have adopted an abominable system.  By refusing obstinately to speak, you rush voluntarily into the gravest danger.  Listen well to what I tell you.  If you wait till the examination is over, you are lost.  If you are once handed over to the court, it is too late for you to speak.  You will only, innocent as you are, make one more on the list of judicial murders.”

Jacques de Boiscoran had listened to Dionysia in silence, his head bowed to the ground, as if to conceal its pallor from her.  As soon as she stopped, all out of breath, he murmured,—­

“Alas!  Every thing you tell me I have told myself more than once.”

“And you did not speak?”

“I did not.”

“Ah, Jacques, you are not aware of the danger you run!  You do not know”—­

“I know,” he said, interrupting her in a harsh, hoarse voice,—­“I know that the scaffold, or the galleys, are at the end.”

Dionysia was petrified with horror.

Poor girl!  She had imagined that she would only have to show herself to triumph over Jacques’s obstinacy, and that, as soon as she had heard what he had to say, she would feel reassured.  And instead of that—­

“What a misfortune!” she cried.  “You have taken up these fearful notions, and you will not abandon them!”

“I must keep silent.”

“You cannot.  You have not considered!—­”

“Not considered,” he repeated.

And in a lower tone he added,—­

“And what do you think I have been doing these hundred and thirty mortal hours since I have been alone in this prison,—­alone to confront a terrible accusation, and a still more terrible emergency?”

“That is the difficulty, Jacques:  you are the victim of your own imagination.  And who could help it in your place?  M. Folgat said so only yesterday.  There is no man living, who, after four days’ close confinement, can keep his mind cool.  Grief and solitude are bad counsellors.  Jacques, come to yourself; listen to your dearest friends who speak to you through me.  Jacques, your Dionysia beseeches you.  Speak!”

“I cannot.”

“Why not?”

She waited for some seconds; and, as he did not reply, she said, not without a slight accent of bitterness in her voice,—­

“Is it not the first duty of an innocent man to establish his innocence?”

The prisoner, with a movement of despair, clasped his hands over his brow.  Then bending over Dionysia, so that she felt his breath in her hair, he said,—­

“And when he cannot, when he cannot, establish his innocence?”