must take her my last look; you must tell her that you were the last

man whose hand I pressed. Oh, she'll love you, the poor woman! you, my
last friend. Here," he said, after a moment's silence, during which he

was overcome by the weight of his recollections, "all, officers and
soldiers, are unknown to me; I am an object of horror to them. If it

were not for you my innocence would be a secret between God and
myself."

I swore to sacredly fulfil his last wishes. My words, the emotion I
showed touched him. Soon after that the soldiers came to take him

again before the council of war. He was condemned to death. I am
ignorant of the formalities that followed or accompanied this

judgment, nor do I know whether the young surgeon defended his life or
not; but he expected to be executed on the following day, and he spent

the night in writing to his mother.
"We shall both be free to-day," he said, smiling, when I went to see

him the next morning. "I am told that the general has signed your
pardon."

I was silent, and looked at him closely so as to carve his features,
as it were, on my memory. Presently an expression of disgust crossed

his face.
"I have been very cowardly," he said. "During all last night I begged

for mercy of these walls," and he pointed to the sides of his dungeon.
"Yes, yes, I howled with despair, I rebelled, I suffered the most

awful moral agony--I was alone! Now I think of what others will say of
me. Courage is a garment to put on. I desire to go decently to death,

therefore--"
A DOUBLE RETRIBUTION

"Oh, stop! stop!" cried the young lady who had asked for this history,
interrupting the narrator suddenly. "Say no more; let me remain in

uncertainty and believe that he was saved. If I hear now that he was
shot I shall not sleep all night. To-morrow you shall tell me the

rest."
We rose from table. My neighbor in accepting Monsieur Hermann's arm,

said to him--
"I suppose he was shot, was he not?"

"Yes. I was present at the execution."
"Oh! monsieur," she said, "how could you--"

"He desired it, madame. There was something really dreadful in
following the funeral of a living man, a man my heart cared for, an

innocent man! The poor young fellow never ceased to look at me. He
seemed to live only in me. He wanted, he said, that I should carry to

his mother his last sigh."
"And did you?"

"At the peace of Amiens I went to France, for the purpose of taking to
the mother those blessed words, 'He was innocent.' I 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 eternalsecrecy 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 magnet between them.
I don't know which has the strongest power of attraction, vengeance or

crime, hatred or insult. Like a priest who cannot consecrate the host
in presence of an evil spirit, each is ill at ease and distrustful;

one is polite, the other surly, but I know not which; one colors or
turns pale, the other trembles. Often the avenger is as cowardly as

the victim. Few men have the courage to invoke an evil, even when just
or necessary, and men are silent or forgive a wrong from hatred of

uproar or fear of some tragic ending.
This introsusception of our souls and our sentiments created a

mysterious struggle between Taillefer and myself. Since the first
inquiry I had put to him during Monsieur Hermann's narrative, he had

steadily avoided my eye. Possibly he avoided those of all the other
guests. He talked with the youthful, inexperienced daughter of the

banker, feeling, no doubt, like many other criminals, a need of
drawing near to innocence, hoping to find rest there. But, though I

was a long distance from him, I heard him, and my piercing eye
fascinated his. When he thought he could watch me unobserved our eyes

met, and his eyelids dropped immediately.
Weary of this torture, Taillefer seemed determined to put an end to it

by sitting down at a card-table. I at once went to bet on his
adversary; hoping to lose my money. The wish was granted; the player

left the table and I took his place, face to face with the murderer.
"Monsieur," I said, while he dealt the cards, "may I ask if you are

Monsieur Frederic Taillefer, whose family I know very well at
Beauvais?"

"Yes, monsieur," he answered.
He dropped the cards, turned pale, put his hands to his head and rose,

asking one of the bettors to take his hand.
"It is too hot here," he cried; "I fear--"

He did not end the sentence. His face expressed intolerablesuffering,
and he went out hastily. The master of the house followed him and

seemed to take an anxious interest in his condition. My neighbor and I
looked at each other, but I saw a tinge of bitter sadness or reproach

upon her countenance.
"Do you think your conduct is merciful?" she asked, drawing me to the

embrasure of a window just as I was leaving the card-table, having
lost all my money. "Would you accept the power of reading hearts? Why

not leave things to human justice or divine justice? We may escape one
but we cannot escape the other. Do you think the privilege of a judge

of the court of assizes so much to be envied? You have almost done the
work of an executioner."

"After sharing and stimulating my curiosity, why are you now lecturing
me on morality?"

"You have made me reflect," she answered.
"So, then, peace to villains, war to the sorrowful, and let's deify

gold! However, we will drop the subject," I added, laughing. "Do you
see that young girl who is just entering the salon?"