Saint-Yves, if
I hear of you moving directly or indirectly in this matter, I shall do
my duty, let it cost what it will: that is, I shall communicate the real
name of the Buonapartist spy who signs his letters _Rue Gregoire de
Tours_."

I confess my heart was already almost altogether on the side of my
insulted and unhappy cousin; and if it had not been before, it must have
been so now, so horrid was the shock with which he heard his infamy
exposed. Speech was denied him; he carried his hand to his neckcloth; he
staggered; I thought he must have fallen. I ran to help him, and at that
he revived, recoiled before me, and stood there with arms stretched
forth as if to preserve himself from the outrage of my touch.

"Hands off!" he somehow managed to articulate.

"You will now, I hope," pursued the lawyer, without any change of voice,
"understand the position in which you are placed, and how delicately it
behoves you to conduct yourself. Your arrest hangs, if I may so express
myself, by a hair; and as you will be under the perpetual vigilance of
myself and my agents, you must look to it narrowly that you walk
straight. Upon the least dubiety, I will take action." He snuffed,
looking critically at the tortured man. "And now let me remind you that
your chaise is at the door. This interview is agitating to his
lordship--it cannot be agreeable for you--and I suggest that it need not
be further drawn out. It does not enter into the views of your uncle,
the Count, that you should again sleep under this roof."

As Alain turned and passed without a word or a sign from the apartment,
I instantly followed. I suppose I must be at bottom possessed of some
humanity; at least, this accumulated torture, this slow butchery of a
man as by quarters of rock, had wholly changed my sympathies. At that
moment I loathed both my uncle and the lawyer for their cold-blooded
cruelty.

Leaning over the banisters, I was but in time to hear his hasty
footsteps in that hall that had been crowded with servants to honour
his coming, and was now left empty against his friendless departure. A
moment later, and the echoes rang, and the air whistled in my ears, as
he slammed the door on his departing footsteps. The fury of the
concussion gave me (had one been still wanted) a measure of the turmoil
of his passions. In a sense I felt with him; I felt how he would have
gloried to slam that door on my uncle, the lawyer, myself, and the whole
crowd of those