words to the General privately.

Vertessy hastened to him at once.

"You defended yourself badly," said he reproachfully on entering, "you
made it impossible for us to pronounce any other sentence."

"I know that, I wished it so," replied the youth with a bright, calm
countenance. "That is all over now, General; it was a soldier's duty to
condemn me. In three days' time I am to die. Take it as if I was very
sick, and the doctors had told you beforehand that I had only three more
days to live."

"I will send the sentence to His Majesty."

"It would be useless. Why, even you can advance nothing in my defence,
and I have myself nothing to allege in mitigation of my sentence."

"But I know everything. Others have come forward to defend you, and if
you had not cut the ground from under my feet by your defiant answers
before the court-martial, I might have devised some means of saving
you."

"I am surprised that anyone should have defended me. I know of none who
might bear me in mind."

"Indeed yes. First of all there was my wife."

"Ah! General, such knowledge will make my death the easier."

"Then there was the man you fired at in your stupid jealousy."

"Then he did not die after all?" exclaimed the youth joyfully. "It does
me good to hear that."

"That's all one so far as you are concerned. You have in any case
committed a capital offence."

"But my heart is the easier, nevertheless. A load has been removed from
it. I thank you. What you have said will shorten my last moments."

"Your third advocate was your father."

"What?" stammered the youth with trembling lips--"my father, did you
say?--my own father?"

"Your own dear father. He wrote to me with those trembling hands of his,
those hands which have barely recovered from a paralytic stroke. He
wrote to me himself--do you realise what that means?"

"He wrote on my account!" whispered the condemned man, clasping his
manacled hands together and closing his heavy eyelashes over his moist
eyes.

"Your fourth advocate was Count Kamienszki, whose sister you will
doubtless remember."

The youth looked up in astonishment.

"I have no recollection of such a person. _She_ had no brother."

Vertessy shrugged his shoulders.

"He himself told me so, he was with me here to-day."

A struggle with a torturing suspicion seemed to be going on in the young
soldier's troubled mind; presently, however, he turned to the General
with a radiant countenance and sai