y defiant! But on reflection he decided
that what he had witnessed was no real sense of security, still less a
real innocence. It was only a very superior style of brazen assurance.
"Wait till she reads the paper!" he said to himself; and he concluded
that he should hear from her soon.

He heard sooner than he expected. The next morning, before midday,
when he was about to give orders for his breakfast to be served, M. de
Bellegarde's card was brought to him. "She has read the paper and she
has passed a bad night," said Newman. He instantly admitted his visitor,
who came in with the air of the ambassador of a great power meeting the
delegate of a barbarous tribe whom an absurd accident had enabled for
the moment to be abominably annoying. The ambassador, at all events, had
passed a bad night, and his faultlessly careful toilet only threw
into relief the frigid rancor in his eyes and the mottled tones of his
refined complexion. He stood before Newman a moment, breathing quickly
and softly, and shaking his forefinger curtly as his host pointed to a
chair.

"What I have come to say is soon said," he declared "and can only be
said without ceremony."

"I am good for as much or for as little as you desire," said Newman.

The marquis looked round the room a moment, and then, "On what terms
will you part with your scrap of paper?"

"On none!" And while Newman, with his head on one side and his hands
behind him sounded the marquis's turbid gaze with his own, he added,
"Certainly, that is not worth sitting down about."

M. de Bellegarde meditated a moment, as if he had not heard Newman's
refusal. "My mother and I, last evening," he said, "talked over your
story. You will be surprised to learn that we think your little document
is--a"--and he held back his word a moment--"is genuine."

"You forget that with you I am used to surprises!" exclaimed Newman,
with a laugh.

"The very smallest amount of respect that we owe to my father's memory,"
the marquis continued, "makes us desire that he should not be held up to
the world as the author of so--so infernal an attack upon the reputation
of a wife whose only fault was that she had been submissive to
accumulated injury."

"Oh, I see," said Newman. "It's for your father's sake." And he laughed
the laugh in which he indulged when he was most amused--a noiseless
laugh, with his lips closed.

But M. de Bellegarde's gravity held good. "There are a few of my
father's particular f