as
only in the close gossip of private circles that it was audibly vented.

I had formed an opinion by no means favourable to the innocence of Mr.
Jean Desmarais; and I took especial care that the Necessitarian, who
would only have thought robbery and murder pieces of ill-luck, should
undergo a most rigorous examination. I remembered that he had seen me
put the packet into the escritoire; and this circumstance was alone
sufficient to arouse my suspicion. Desmarais bared his breast gracefully
to the magistrate. "Would a man, Sir," he said, "a man of my youth,
suffer such a scar as that, if he could help it?" The magistrate
laughed: frivolity is often a rogue's best policy, if he did but know
it. One finds it very difficult to think a coxcomb can commit robbery
and murder. Howbeit Desmarais came off triumphantly; and immediately
after this examination, which had been his second one, and instigated
solely at my desire, he came to me with a blush of virtuous indignation
on his thin cheeks. "He did not presume," he said, with a bow profounder
than ever, "to find fault with Monsieur le Comte; it was his fate to be
the victim of ungrateful suspicion: but philosophical truths could
not always conquer the feelings of the man, and he came to request his
dismissal." I gave it him with pleasure.

I must now state my own feelings on the matter; but I shall do so
briefly. In my own mind, I repeat, I was fully impressed with the
conviction that Gerald was the real and the head criminal; and thrice
did I resolve to repair to Devereux Court, where he still resided, to
lie in wait for him, to reproach him with his guilt, and at the sword's
point in deadly combat to seek its earthly expiation. I spare the reader
a narration of the terrible struggles which nature, conscience, all
scruples and prepossessions of education and of blood, held with this
resolution, the unholiness of which I endeavoured to clothe with the
name of justice to Isora. Suffice it to say that this resolution I
forewent at last; and I did so more from a feeling that, despite my
own conviction of Gerald's guilt, one rational doubt rested upon the
circumstance that the murderer seemed to my eyes of an inferior height
to Gerald, and that the person whom I had pursued on the night I had
received that wound which brought Isora to my bedside, and who, it was
natural to believe, was my rival, appeared to me not only also slighter
and shorter than Gerald, but of a size that s