think other people----"

M. Etienne Rambert sat with his head between his hands, wrapped in
thought; there was a short silence before the unhappy father replied:

"Unfortunately there is evidence against you," he said at last; "and
damning evidence, too!" he added with a glance at his son that seemed to
pulverise him. "Terrible evidence! Consider, Charles: the magistrates
have decided, as a result of their investigations, that no one got into
the chateau on the fatal night; you were the only man who slept there;
and none but a man could possibly have committed such a horrible crime,
such a monstrous piece of butchery!"

"Someone might have got in from outside," the unhappy lad urged, as if
trying to escape from the network in which he was being entangled.

"No one did," Etienne Rambert insisted; "besides, how could you prove
it?"

Charles was silent. He stood in the middle of the room, with trembling
legs and haggard eyes, seemingly stupefied and incapable of coherent
thought, vacantly watching his father. With bent head and shoulders
bowed as though beneath a too-heavy load, Etienne Rambert moved towards
the dressing-room attached to the bedroom.

"Come here," he said in an almost inaudible voice; "follow me."

He went into the dressing-room, and picking up the towels that were
heaped anyhow on the lower rail of the washstand, he selected a very
crumpled one and held it out in front of his son.

"Look at that!" he said in a low, curt tone.

And on the towel, thus held in the light, Charles Rambert saw red stains
of blood. The lad started, and was about to burst into some
protestation, but Etienne Rambert imperiously checked him.

"Do you still deny it? Unhappy, wretched boy, there is the convincing,
irrefutable evidence of your guilt! These stains of blood proclaim it.
Something always is overlooked! How are you to explain the presence of
this blood-stained linen in your room? Can you still deny that it is
proof positive of your guilt?"

"But I do deny it, I do deny it! I don't understand! I know nothing
about it!" and once more Charles Rambert collapsed into the arm-chair;
the unhappy lad was nothing but a human wreck, with no strength to argue
or even utter a word.

His father's eyes rested on him, filled with infinite affection and
profoundest pity.

"My poor, poor boy!" the unhappy Etienne Rambert murmured, and added, as
if speaking only to himself: "I wonder if you are not entirely
responsible--if