at could not be. Dead bodies are not kept a year;
they are shown to a magistrate, and the evidence is taken. Now, nothing
of the kind has happened."

"What then?" asked Hermine, trembling violently.

"Something more terrible, more fatal, more alarming for us--the child
was, perhaps, alive, and the assassin may have saved it!"

Madame Danglars uttered a piercing cry, and, seizing Villefort's hands,
exclaimed, "My child was alive?" said she; "you buried my child alive?
You were not certain my child was dead, and you buried it? Ah"--

Madame Danglars had risen, and stood before the procureur, whose hands
she wrung in her feeble grasp. "I know not; I merely suppose so, as I
might suppose anything else," replied Villefort with a look so fixed,
it indicated that his powerful mind was on the verge of despair and
madness. "Ah, my child, my poor child!" cried the baroness, falling
on her chair, and stifling her sobs in her handkerchief. Villefort,
becoming somewhat reassured, perceived that to avert the maternal storm
gathering over his head, he must inspire Madame Danglars with the terror
he felt. "You understand, then, that if it were so," said he, rising in
his turn, and approaching the baroness, to speak to her in a lower tone,
"we are lost. This child lives, and some one knows it lives--some one is
in possession of our secret; and since Monte Cristo speaks before us of
a child disinterred, when that child could not be found, it is he who is
in possession of our secret."

"Just God, avenging God!" murmured Madame Danglars.

Villefort's only answer was a stifled groan.

"But the child--the child, sir?" repeated the agitated mother.

"How I have searched for him," replied Villefort, wringing his hands;
"how I have called him in my long sleepless nights; how I have longed
for royal wealth to purchase a million of secrets from a million of men,
and to find mine among them! At last, one day, when for the hundredth
time I took up my spade, I asked myself again and again what the
Corsican could have done with the child. A child encumbers a fugitive;
perhaps, on perceiving it was still alive, he had thrown it into the
river."

"Impossible!" cried Madame Danglars: "a man may murder another out of
revenge, but he would not deliberately drown a child."

"Perhaps," continued Villefort, "he had put it in the foundling
hospital."

"Oh, yes, yes," cried the baroness; "my child is there!"

"I ran to the hospital, and learned t