religiously
undertook that pilgrimage. But Madame Magnan had died of consumption. It
was not without deep emotion that I burned the letter of which I was
the bearer. You will perhaps smile at my German imagination, but I see
a drama of sad sublimity in the eternal secrecy which engulfed those
parting words cast between two graves, unknown to all creation, like the
cry uttered in a desert by some lonely traveller whom a lion seizes."

"And if," I said, interrupting him, "you were brought face to face with
a man now in this room, and were told, 'This is the murderer!' would not
that be another drama? And what would you do?"

Monsieur Hermann looked for his hat and went away.

"You are behaving like a young man, and very heedlessly," said my
neighbor. "Look at Taillefer!--there, seated on that sofa at the corner
of the fireplace. Mademoiselle Fanny is offering him a cup of coffee.
He smiles. Would a murderer to whom that tale must have been torture,
present so calm a face? Isn't his whole air patriarchal?"

"Yes; but go and ask him if he went to the war in Germany," I said.

"Why not?"

And with that audacity which is seldom lacking to women when some action
attracts them, or their minds are impelled by curiosity, my neighbor
went up to the purveyor.

"Were you ever in Germany?" she asked.

Taillefer came near dropping his cup and saucer.

"I, madame? No, never."

"What are you talking about, Taillefer"; said our host, interrupting
him. "Were you not in the commissariat during the campaign of Wagram?"

"Ah, true!" replied Taillefer, "I was there at that time."

"You are mistaken," said my neighbor, returning to my side; "that's a
good man."

"Well," I cried, "before the end of this evening, I will hunt that
murderer out of the slough in which he is hiding."

Every day, before our eyes, a moral phenomenon of amazing profundity
takes place which is, nevertheless, so simple as never to be noticed.
If two men meet in a salon, one of whom has the right to hate or despise
the other, whether from a knowledge of some private and latent fact
which degrades him, or of a secret condition, or even of a coming
revenge, those two men divine each other's souls, and are able to
measure the gulf which separates or ought to separate them. They observe
each other unconsciously; their minds are preoccupied by themselves;
through their looks, their gestures, an indefinable emanation of their
thought transpires; there's a magn