he clerk had finished Etienne Rambert sat still, with his forehead
resting in his hands, as if crushed by the weight of the memories the
indictment had evoked. Then the sharp, thin voice of the President of
the Court snapped the chain of his thoughts.

"Stand up, sir!"

And pale as death Etienne Rambert rose and folded his arms across his
breast. In firm, yet somehow muffled tones, he answered the preliminary
formal questions. His name was Herve Paul Etienne Rambert; his age,
fifty-nine; his occupation, a merchant, owning and working rubber
plantations in South America. Then followed the formal enquiry whether
he had heard and understood the indictment which had just been read.

"I followed it all, sir," he replied, with a little gesture expressive
of his sense of the gravity of the facts detailed and the weight of the
evidence adduced, which won general sympathy for him. "I followed it
all, but I protest against some of the allegations, and I protest with
my whole energy against the suggestion that I have failed in my duty as
a man of honour and as a father!"

The President of the Court checked him irritably.

"Excuse me, I do not intend to permit you to extend the pleadings
indefinitely. I shall examine you on the various points of the
indictment, and you may protest as much as you please." The unfeeling
rudeness provoked no comment from the defendant, and the President
proceeded. "Well, you have heard the indictment. It charges you first
with having aided and abetted the escape of your son, whom an enquiry
held in another place had implicated in the murder of the Marquise de
Langrune; and it charges you secondly with having killed your son, whose
body has been recovered from the Dordogne, in order that you might
escape the penalty of public obloquy."

At this brutal statement of the case Etienne Rambert made a proud
gesture of indignation.

"Sir," he exclaimed, "there are different ways of putting things. I do
not deny the purport of the indictment, but I object to the summary of
it that you present. No one has ever dared to contend that I killed my
son in order to escape public obloquy, as you have just insinuated. I am
entirely indifferent to the worlds opinion. What the indictment is
intended to allege, the only thing it can allege, is that I wrought
justice upon a criminal who ought to have filled me with horror but
whom, nevertheless, I ought not to have handed over to the public
executioner."

This ti