civilly, you are dead?"

"I would a thousand times rather be really dead!" the unhappy lad
exclaimed.

"Alas!" his father murmured, speaking very fast, "I thought your mind
was more unhinged than it really is. I saved your life, regardless of
all risk, because I thought you were insane, and now I know you are a
criminal! Oh, yes, I know things, I know your life!"

"Father," said Charles Rambert with so stern and determined an
expression that Etienne Rambert felt a moment's fear. "I want to know
first of all how you managed to save my life and make out that I was
dead. Was that just chance, or was it planned deliberately?"

Confronted with this new firmness of his son's, Etienne Rambert dropped
his peremptory tone; his shoulders drooped in distress.

"Can one anticipate things like that?" he said. "When we parted, my
heart bled to think that you, my son, must fall into the hands of
justice, and that your feet must tread the path that led to the scaffold
or, at least, to the galleys; I wondered how I could save you; then
chance, chance, mark you, brought that poor drowned body in my way: I
saw the fortunate coincidence of a faint resemblance, and resolved to
pass it off for you; I got those woman's clothes which you exchanged for
yours, buried the dead man's clothes and put yours on the corpse. Do you
know, Charles, that I have suffered too? Do you know what agony and
torture I, as a man of honour, have endured? Have you not heard the
story of my appearance at the Assizes and of my humiliation in court?"

"You did all that!" Charles Rambert murmured. "Strange chance, indeed!"
Then his tone changed and he sobbed. "Oh, my poor father, what an awful
fatality it all is!" Suddenly he sprang to his feet. "But I committed no
crime, papa! I never killed the Marquise de Langrune! Oh, do believe me!
Why, you have just this minute said that you know I am not mad!"

Etienne Rambert looked at his son with distress.

"Not mad, my poor boy? Yet perhaps you were mad--then?" Then he stopped
abruptly. "Don't let us go over all that again! I forbid it absolutely."
He leaned back on his writing-table, folded his arms and asked sternly:
"Have you come here only to tell me that?"

The curt question seemed to affect the lad strangely. All his former
audacity dropped from him. Nervously he stammered:

"I can't remain a woman any longer!"

"Why not?" snapped Etienne Rambert.

"I can't."

The two men looked at each other in silence