mas, eagerly; "if thou canst do this, on
my own responsibility I will postpone the trial of the Italian. Now name
the proxy!"

"You behold him!"

"Thou!" exclaimed Dumas, while a fear he could not conceal betrayed
itself through his surprise. "Thou!--and thou comest to me alone at
night, to offer thyself to justice. Ha!--this is a snare. Tremble,
fool!--thou art in my power, and I can have BOTH!"

"You can," said the stranger, with a calm smile of disdain; "but my life
is valueless without my revelations. Sit still, I command you,--hear
me!" and the light in those dauntless eyes spell-bound and awed the
judge. "You will remove me to the Conciergerie,--you will fix my trial,
under the name of Zanoni, amidst your fournee of to-morrow. If I do
not satisfy you by my speech, you hold the woman I die to save as your
hostage. It is but the reprieve for her of a single day that I demand.
The day following the morrow I shall be dust, and you may wreak your
vengeance on the life that remains. Tush! judge and condemner of
thousands, do you hesitate,--do you imagine that the man who voluntarily
offers himself to death will be daunted into uttering one syllable at
your Bar against his will? Have you not had experience enough of the
inflexibility of pride and courage? President, I place before you the
ink and implements! Write to the jailer a reprieve of one day for the
woman whose life can avail you nothing, and I will bear the order to my
own prison: I, who can now tell this much as an earnest of what I can
communicate,--while I speak, your own name, judge, is in a list of
death. I can tell you by whose hand it is written down; I can tell you
in what quarter to look for danger; I can tell you from what cloud, in
this lurid atmosphere, hangs the storm that shall burst on Robespierre
and his reign!"

Dumas grew pale; and his eyes vainly sought to escape the magnetic gaze
that overpowered and mastered him. Mechanically, and as if under an
agency not his own, he wrote while the stranger dictated.

"Well," he said then, forcing a smile to his lips, "I promised I would
serve you; see, I am faithful to my word. I suppose that you are one of
those fools of feeling,--those professors of anti-revolutionary virtue,
of whom I have seen not a few before my Bar. Faugh! it sickens me to see
those who make a merit of incivism, and perish to save some bad patriot,
because it is a son, or a father, or a wife, or a daughter, who is
saved."

"