ook; 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