evidence could be obtained; and, ere
long, a letter arrived to your address from Normandy, stating the
arrival of your trunk by the carrier, and expressing surprise at your
non-appearance. A judicial summons, detailing your name and person, and
citing you to appear and give evidence against the supposed murderer,
led to no discovery of your retreat, and the evidence of your wounded
fellow-travellers was obscure and contradictory. Meanwhile, however,
several of the robbers who had attacked the diligence were captured by
the _gens-d'armes_. When confronted with Bartholdy, their intelligence
was sufficiently obvious, and he at length confessed his co-operation in
the murderous assault upon the travellers; but stoutly denied that he
had either injured or even seen you amongst the passengers, and as
tenaciously maintained his innocence of the murder committed in the
grove. Your entire disappearance however, his emotion on beholding the
knife, and his admission that he knew it, still operated so strongly
against him that he was tried and pronounced guilty of three crimes,
each of which was punishable with death. During the week succeeding his
trial, he was supplied by a confederate with tools, which enabled him to
escape and resume his predatory habits; nor was he retaken until a month
before his execution, while engaged in a robbery of singular boldness
and atrocity. He was recognised as the hardened criminal who had escaped
from confinement at D.; and as the authorities were apprehensive that no
prison would long hold so expert and desperate a villain, an order was
obtained from Paris for the immediate execution of the sentence already
passed upon him at D. Thus, although guilty of one only of the three
crimes for which he suffered, the forfeiture of ten lives would not have
atoned for his multiplied transgressions. From boyhood even he had
preyed upon society with the insatiable ferocity of a tiger; and you, my
son, ought not to murmur at the decree which made your early
acquaintance with him the means of stopping his savage career, and your
hand the instrument of retribution."

The concluding words of the venerable priest fell like healing balm upon
the wounded spirit of Florian, who returned home an altered and a
saddened, but a sustained and a devout man: deeply conscious that the
ways of Providence, however intricate, are just; and more resigned to a
vocation, to which he now conceived that he had been for especial
pu