While Lomaque was backing again to his former place behind the chair, Danville approached and whispered to him, “There is a rumor that secret information has reached you about the citizen and citoyenne Dubois. Is it true? Do you know who they are?” “Yes,” answered Lomaque; “but I have superior orders to keep the information to myself just at present.” The eagerness with which Danville put his question, and the disappointment he showed on getting no satisfactory answer to it, were of a nature to satisfy the observant chief agent that his superintendent was really as ignorant as he appeared to be on the subject of the man and woman Dubois. That one mystery, at any rate was still, for Danville, a mystery unrevealed. “Louis Trudaine! Rose Danville!” shouted the crier, with another rap of his bludgeon. The two came forward, at the appeal, to the front railing of the platform. The first sight of her judges, the first shock on confronting the pitiless curiosity of the audience, seemed to overwhelm Rose. She turned from deadly pale to crimson, then to pale again, and hid her face on her brother’s shoulder. How fast she heard his heart throbbing! How the tears filled her eyes as she felt that his fear was all for her! “Now,” said the president, writing down their names. “Denounced by whom?” Magloire and Picard stepped forward to the table. The first answered--“By Citizen Superintendent Danville.” The reply made a great stir and sensation among both prisoners and audience. “Accused of what?” pursued the president. “The male prisoner, of conspiracy against the Republic; the female prisoner, of criminal knowledge of the same.” “Produce your proofs in answer to this order.” Picard and Magloire opened their minutes of evidence, and read to the president the same particulars which they had formerly read to Lomaque in the secret police office. “Good,” said the president, when they had done, “we need trouble ourselves with nothing more than the identifying of the citizen and citoyenne Dubois, which, of course, you are prepared for. Have you heard the evidence?” he continued, turning to the prisoners; while Picard and Magloire consulted together in whispers, looking perplexedly toward the chief agent, who stood silent behind them. “Have you heard the evidence, prisoners? Do you wish to say anything? If you do, remember that the time of this tribunal is precious, and that you will not be suffered to waste it.” “I demand permission to speak for myself and for my sister,” answered Trudaine. “My object is to save the time of the tribunal by making a confession.” The faint whispering, audible among the women spectators a moment before, ceased instantaneously as he pronounced the word confession. In the breathless silence, his low, quiet tones penetrated to the remotest corners of the hall; while, suppressing externally all evidences of the death-agony of hope within him, he continued his address in these words: