ieur
Ginory? Would not a man have been shut up as a lunatic thirty years ago
who would have pretended that he had discovered that? We shall see--we
shall see many others!"

"And will it add to the happiness of man? and will it diminish grief,
wickedness and crime?"

The Magistrate spoke as if to himself, thoughtfully, sadly. Something
Bernardet said brought a smile to his lips.

"This is, Monsieur le Juge, a fine ending of the chapter for the second
part of your work, 'The Duty of a Magistrate Toward Scientific
Discoveries.' And if the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences does
not add"----

M. Ginory suddenly turned red and interrupted Bernardet with a word and
a gesture.

"Monsieur Bernardet!"

"I can only repeat, Monsieur, what public opinion thinks and says," said
Bernardet, bowing low. "There was an illusion to this affair written up.
An amiable fellow--that Paul Rodier."

"Ah! Monsieur Bernardet, Monsieur Bernardet!" laughingly said the
Magistrate, "you have a weakness for reporters. Do you want me to tell
you something? You will finish by becoming a journalist."

"And you will certainly finish in the habit of a member of the Academy,
Monsieur Ginory," said the little Bernardet, with his air of a mocking
abbe.

CHAPTER XVIII.

VERY often, after his release from prison, Jacques Dantin went to the
corner of the cemetery at Montmartre, where his friend lay. And he
always carried flowers. It had become to him, since the terrible strain
of his detention, a necessity, a habit. The dead are living! They wait,
they understand, they listen!

It seemed to Dantin that he had but one aim. Alas! What had been the
wish, the last dream of the dead man would never be realized. That
fortune which Rovere had intended for the child whom he had no right to
call his own would go, was going to some far-off cousins of whose
existence the ex-Consul was not even aware perhaps, and whom he
certainly had never known--to some indifferent persons, chance
relatives, strangers.

"I ought not to have waited for him to tell me what his intentions were
regarding his daughter," Dantin often thought. What would become of her,
the poor girl, who knew the secret of her birth and who remained silent,
piously devoting herself to the old soldier whose name she bore?

One day in February a sad, gray day, Jacques Dantin, thinking of the
past Winter so unhappy of the sad secret grave and heavy, stroll