"Forgive me, if I have unintentionally pained and shocked you," I
replied. "Remember the cruel wrong my wife has suffered at Count
Fosco's hands. Remember that the wrong can never be redressed, unless
the means are in my power of forcing him to do her justice. I spoke in
HER interests, Pesca--I ask you again to forgive me--I can say no more."

I rose to go. He stopped me before I reached the door.

"Wait," he said. "You have shaken me from head to foot. You don't
know how I left my country, and why I left my country. Let me compose
myself, let me think, if I can."

I returned to my chair. He walked up and down the room, talking to
himself incoherently in his own language. After several turns
backwards and forwards, he suddenly came up to me, and laid his little
hands with a strange tenderness and solemnity on my breast.

"On your heart and soul, Walter," he said, "is there no other way to
get to that man but the chance-way through ME?"

"There is no other way," I answered.

He left me again, opened the door of the room and looked out cautiously
into the passage, closed it once more, and came back.

"You won your right over me, Walter," he said, "on the day when you
saved my life. It was yours from that moment, when you pleased to take
it. Take it now. Yes! I mean what I say. My next words, as true as
the good God is above us, will put my life into your hands."

The trembling earnestness with which he uttered this extraordinary
warning, carried with it, to my mind, the conviction that he spoke the
truth.

"Mind this!" he went on, shaking his hands at me in the vehemence of
his agitation. "I hold no thread, in my own mind, between that man
Fosco, and the past time which I call back to me for your sake. If you
find the thread, keep it to yourself--tell me nothing--on my knees I
beg and pray, let me be ignorant, let me be innocent, let me be blind
to all the future as I am now!"

He said a few words more, hesitatingly and disconnectedly, then stopped
again.

I saw that the effort of expressing himself in English, on an occasion
too serious to permit him the use of the quaint turns and phrases of
his ordinary vocabulary, was painfully increasing the difficulty he had
felt from the first in speaking to me at all. Having learnt to read and
understand his native language (though not to speak it), in the earlier
days of our intimate companionship, I now suggested to him that he
should express himself