the bed, while Florent Chapron, always faithful, was preparing the oil to put upon the face of the corpse, and sinister Lydia Maitland was watching the scene with eyes which made me shudder, reminding me of what I had divined at the time of my last conversation with Alba.  If she does not undertake to play the part of a Nemesis and to tell all to the Countess, I am mistaken in faces!  For the moment she was silent, and guess the only words the mother uttered when her lover, he on whose account her daughter had suffered so much, approached their common victim:  ‘Above all, do not injure her lovely lashes!’ What horrible irony, was it not?  Horrible!”

The young man sank upon a bench as he uttered that cry of distress and of remorse, which Montfanon mechanically repeated, as if startled by the tragical confidence he had just received.

Montfanon shook his gray head several times as if deliberating; then forced Dorsenne to rise, chiding him thus: 

“Come, Julien, we can not remain here all the afternoon dreaming and sighing like young women!  The child is dead.  We can not restore her to life, you in despairing, I in deploring.  We should do better to look in the face our responsibility in that sinister adventure, to repent of it and to expiate it.”

“Our responsibility?” interrogated Julien.  “I see mine, although I can truly not see yours.”

“Yours and mine,” replied Montfanon.  “I am no sophist, and I am not in the habit of shifting my conscience.  Yes or no,” he insisted, with a return of his usual excitement, “did I leave the catacombs to arrange that unfortunate duel?  Yes or no, did I yield to the paroxysm of choler which possessed me on hearing of the engagement of Ardea and on finding that I was in the presence of that equivocal Hafner?  Yes or no, did that duel help to enlighten Madame Gorka as to her husband’s doings, and, in consequence, Mademoiselle Steno as to her mother’s?  Did you not relate to me the progress of her anguish since that scandal, there just now?....  And if I have been startled, as I have been, by the news of that suicide, know it has been for this reason especially, because a voice has said to me:  ‘A few of the tears of that dead girl are laid to your account."’

“But, my poor friend,” interrupted Dorsenne, “whence such reasoning?  According to that, we could not live any more.  There enters into our lives, by indirect means, a collection of actions which in no way concerns us, and in admitting that we have a debt of responsibility to pay, that debt commences and ends in that which we have wished directly, sincerely, clearly.”